>> Announcer: Live form the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hi, my name is Lauren Cooney and welcome back to theCUBE. Today we're actually at down in Mountain View at DevNet Connect where we're talking to folks about Cloud, DevOps, things along those lines and really what developers are looking for in today's environment. Today I'm here with Curt. And we're going to talk a little bit about what Kurt is doing and why he's here and what's going on in your world? >> Thanks Lauren. I'm excited to be here. This is, being at a DevNet Create, where IOT is sort of a major backdrop is a change of pace for us and something that we're very excited about to get involved in. >> Great, so what, you're here for IOT, what're you really looking at within IOT? What is interesting to you? >> Well, so I work with Sonatype and our, sort of, passion and what we bring to the world of IT in general, is software supply change. We saw a gap in virtually unlimited supply of open source components that are being used to develop modern solutions and we've been helping our enterprise customers solve this problem for a while and it now occurs to us that it's just going to explode and get much bigger with IOT. >> Lauren: And all the types of devices. >> And it's all the same problems and it's the same sorts of things that we need to think about as a traditional IT, if you will. Traditional applications. >> Great. So what's an example of a customer that you would help with regards to your solution and with IOT? >> So, it would be generally a large enterprise that's looking to put some governance around what's flowing into their organization in terms of these free components: libraries, utilities, that are being packaged together and delivered. In the world of IOT, what's interesting is we also need to be very careful about what we put in there for possible exploits. And we need to be thinking about how are we going to keep them patched and updated, right? >> Lauren: Mhm. >> We have a saying at Sonatype that software ages like milk and not like wine. So it's generally just a matter of time before components start to show their age and suffer from known exploit patterns. And so we're going to need to get in front of that problem and make sure we're thinking about it as we start to develop, you know, the millions and billions of devices that are going to start to proliferate throughout our lives. >> Exactly and so how do you decide, kind of, what open source you support or what devices you support inside of that supply chain? >> Yeah, so we're focused on it. So we're looking at just the open source, right? So, it's not the proprietary stuff. It's not the commercial stuff. So we're watching like the 60 million github repositories and we're watching a million events a day trigger. And we're just looking through the forums and through the commit logs and a variety of others, you know, like a thousand plus other sources. And correlating all that data into something that's very specific and actionable, so that our customers can ultimately make an informed decision about what they're using, right? So half of the battle of managing risk is simply being aware -- >> Oh definitely. >> of what you got. The goal is not necessarily to be perfectly clean but to have really good awareness of where your weaknesses are so that you can sort of prepare or brace yourself against it or put up other mitigating controls. >> Great and so do you guys provide a dashboard, for example for a compliance team inside of a company? >> What we provide is a fully automated solution that embeds throughout your software delivery life cycle. It's designed for the modern world. It's designed to be very precise so you can automate against it and that's where traditional tools fall down. They were, sort of, built for a waterfall era, where people could take days to go through an approval process. We feel it needs to be done in a matter of minutes, so it fits in a modern pipeline. So yeah we provide that intelligence feed and then we're tied into your build and delivery process and then it does surface. It can break the pipeline and surfaces as a dashboard report where you can drill into the details and then figure out what you got to do to move forward. >> Great, and that tracks licenses and things along those lines as well? >> Yeah, licenses is sort of the original concern of open source. >> Mhm, it is. >> It's been overshadowed by more recent security concerns but licensing is a very important part too if you want to protect your IP, you need to be careful about what you're putting in these devices. >> Oh by far. Now, I was looking at your LinkedIn a little bit earlier and you have a lot of experience with DevOps and actually driving DevOps environments, tooling, things along those lines. Tell us about that. >> Yeah, so I started getting involved in DevOps sort of, when it was very first a word, if you will. I literally rebranded my team, the DevOps team and it was meant to provoke conversations. It was fairly effective at that. But I did develop a high trust team. I actually was able to implement the cultural part of that within my team. I couldn't change the whole Fortune 100 insurance company but we could demonstrate the art of the possible. It was an awesome ride. I was also inviting security to the table long before DevSecOps came on the scene, because I intuitively understand it was holistic and we needed to get everybody involved. So yeah, I'd like to think I was a little bit ahead of the curve there and had an opportunity to do some great work with some great people that continues to serve me well to this day as we as a industry mature into it. >> Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I remember going into a large customer and we were talking about, kind of, a solution for this customer. And at one end of the table was the infrastructure developers. The other end of the table was the app developers and in the middle sat the tooling guys. Right, and so it was always interesting to see how they kind of flock to their different sides and when they started working together, how, you know, a couple people would sit together and they morphed a bit. And I think that's really interesting in terms of the culture element. >> Yeah, I mean that's essentially what my team was. We were that tooling team. But we acted as the team that was bridging those relationships and bringing those teams together. The middle ware team in particular, along with our development team. Ops was a little bit further down the line. But also getting security and audit involved. Stuff like that. So yeah, it was an interesting role. And it's just neat to see that we're maturing as an industry and this is starting to become very real and the tooling now exists to make this stuff very doable, unlike five years ago. You know, there just wasn't quite the tooling there. Conceptually we knew what we wanted to do, but until the tooling shows up, it's hard to really automate it and do it the way you want. >> So, what kind of tooling is exciting you right now? What are you seeing out there, just, you know? >> So what excites me is, in addition to our own product, which is in a family of products that I would say is automated inspection. Right, and so gone are the days of late life cycle, you know, heavy lift, manual inspections and here today, now we have an ability to inspect continuously, early in the process, you know, in that CI pipeline where things are happening ten times a day. We can get that feedback to those delivery teams when it's most timely. And then so you combine that with containerization, at least in the regular application space, which gives us a converge supply change. So now my OS, my midware, everything is flowing through that pipeline, as opposed to when I was doing it. I was taking the application and ultimately deploying it to a statically provision environment. No two of which of those environments ever look quite the same. Now with containers, that problem, sort of, goes away and we have all this inspection tooling that helps us build quality in and not try to inspect it in later. >> Exactly and just, one of the things I'm looking at when I look at supply chain, the question comes to mind around Blockchain. And are you looking at Blockchain as something you might integrate into your solutions at some point in time? >> I'm personally not looking at it yet but it's hard to imagine that I won't be looking at it soon, because I can't read three articles, and one of them not be about Blockchain these days. It seems to hold a lot of promise in terms of providence and you know, basically, chain of custody type things, which are also important to this whole supply chain issue. So yeah I think it has a future. I think I've got a few things on my plate I need to get off first and then I'll have to start looking at Blockchain. >> That's great. Now, is there anything that was really wowing you from the show? I mean we've got, there's Meraki here, they're giving away something like 1.2 million dollars of equipment. You know, were you surprised to see anything or really, you know, outside of just IOT, what're you really seeing pop? >> Yeah, like I said, this is a bit of a new venue for me. I've been attending DevOps days and DevOps enterprise summit and local meetups and I've been really narrowly focused in that space in this last year. So now I'm getting more into the cloud and this is my first IOT based event. It's great to see Cisco in their second year, having such a successful event. It's really grown a lot. It's in a terrific venue. But in terms of wowing me, I think it's just access for me personally to the folks in the IOT communities, so that I can start to wrap my head around it and share our story with them, which I think is a raised some eyebrows and got some interest to think about supply chain issues in that context. >> Well I think it's absolutely necessary that you actually enable the software across the enterprise. I know that my experience in many enterprise organizations would've been a lot easier if I had had your software and the ability to do that. >> Curtis: Yeah. >> You know, I think that's great. So, you know, one of my other questions is are you partnering with DevNet? Is there a relationship there or is this just educational for you? >> No we definitely, we have a relationship with Cisco and we like to support events like this. It helps us get out. It helps us build these types of relationships. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a emerging relationship between Cisco and Sonatype and obviously IOT has such a big future. There's a lot of potential there for both parties I think. >> That's awesome. Well thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sharing everything that you did. And we will be right back from Cisco DevNet.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back here, we're live here in San Francisco for SiliconANGLE's the Cube's exclusive 2 days of coverage for Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create, building on their 3 year old successful DevNet program which is Cisco core developer program now foraying out into the world of cloud native developers, open source, great move for Cisco. Our next guest, Wissam Ali-Ahmad, lead solutions architect with Splunk. Good to see you. >> Good to see you too, John. >> Here with Peter Burris of course, my co-host. >> Wissam: Hi, Peter. >> So Splunk being here is an important thing because you guys have been riding the wave for cloud, certainly your relationship with Amazon web service is well known, very successful. Splunk as a company went public, well known. You guys really, really hit a niche around big data and how cloud has helped you guys accelerate your business. So you've been transformed, but continuing to grow, so you're riding that wave, but now Cisco's on the wave, and Cisco's been involved in the wave. But from a relationship standpoint, oh yeah, we're the networking guys, we're going to come in and help Docker with this, we're going to come in and help Splunk with this, so they've been kind of a helper, not the main player. This is a new way to get back in and be really enabled for the cloud world. What's your reaction to this move by Cisco? >> I mean, we have a great partnership with Cisco for many years. And I think, you know, Splunk plays a good, as you said, we're a good player there. We integrate well. I mean, all the initiatives Cisco's involved with, we have integrations with Cisco on many levels with different technology. And also Splunk, the deal is with Splunk is that you need to bring invisibly to everything, and Splunk is that platform where you have access to all that data throughout all, all is like all that machine data so you have access to all that data, not only application data, not only network data. You need to look at everything these days. Especially when there's attacks. You know we heard recently, of course everybody heard about WannaCry, and to the tech, that attack, you need to look at everything, because you could someone bring in a laptop behind the firewall even, and they can be affected already, and if you don't have access to see what they're doing, not just from a network perspective, like what apps in the cloud they're accessing, you know, what other files on the locally, so, because you have access to all that data in Splunk, you should be able to get better visibility. >> And you guys have a unique position in the sense that you're close, again, to the machine. You know, logs and data We had Amanda on from Cisco, who was, in her tribe as a developer, she's not necessarily a network engineer, but she's brought on that mojo in from the developer community. When she was first day on the job, you know, they were doing some Python, some rest API stuff, you know, basic 101 stuff, but she didn't want to do an app that was showing hey, how many Twitter followers do I have? She had to go in and look at the devices. So now the opportunity with IOT is that for Cisco to make and expose the network for programmability >> Wissam: Right. >> And extend it. How are they going to do that? I mean you're closer to those guys in your relationship, but that's what everyone wants. They want the infrastructure to just go, that's DevOps >> Right. Yeah, they want the edge to come to them. They want data to be more accessible to all the users. And then so Cisco's on that path, definitely on that path, to get more infrastructure visibility in the data center and the networks, so they're definitely on that path of doing that. >> And let me build on this, so if we think about the various components associated with some of the things that Splunk does. A leader in the application of machine and AI and big data related technologies, to solving business problems. The algorithms for doing this have been around for a long time. The hardware couldn't do it, so you had to write really tight software to do it, and you were one of the first companies out there to really do that. And then it was, we'll point all that at sources of data, that you can apply these technologies, to create better business value. And there were two places where people did it. Web logs, for online marketing, and IT, since IT technology throws off an enormous amount of data. So as I think about it, the relationship with Cisco is especially interesting, because Cisco is going to be one of those companies that encourages people to create new sources of data and a lot of it, IOT and other places, and bring it back to companies and technologies that have a proven track record for generating value out of that data. So talk a bit about how Splunk intends to, going back to what John said, riding that wave. The algorithms are here, the hardware can do it, now we've got to get access to more of the data, and here comes Cisco being really serious about moving a lot of data around. What do you think? >> I mean, we like when people bring in a lot of data into Splunk. We also have been focusing a lot on the personas. On the, we call the Sherlock, the data Sherlock. Right, so that unique persona is where they need to look at, how do I make sense of my data? Not only just about bringing data, but how do I make sense of that data. What are solutions? What are use case I need to have better impact on the business? So we're actually helping solve real kind of business use cases. This morning, Yelp had a webinar about how they use Splunk driving all the web infrastructure for Yelp, the Yelp back end for all their-- >> Peter: This is still in the IT? >> Yeah. >> Peter: It's not Yelps marketing group, this is still in the IT? >> But they are correlating that with other business use cases, yes. >> Of course, it will start coming together. So where do you see some of these use cases popping up, now that Cisco is helping to create those new sources, and get people to, you know, acculturating people to the idea that these are sources of value, business value. Where do you see some of the new use cases? >> There's a lot of use cases now coming up around business analytics, around IOT as you mentioned. And an added element of machine learning across different data sources. So if I want to look at not just performance of one service, let's say my elevator, I want to see how that's going to affect other areas of my business, too. So you're able to see not only the power of correlating that data, but also be able to apply machine learning on that data. So there's a lot of use cases around business analytics. Security's always there, because security, as you know, attack vectors are getting complex every few months or so, so you need to also chase that, and you need to look at all the data, the behaviors in that data, to get better predictability, to get better prevention detection. >> So Splunk is emerging as a great software company for a lot of IT pros, but it still is more in the op side. How is this conference and the likelihood or the notion that developers are increasingly going to be part of that use case, it's utilizing data and data-related services to better understand operations, but find new ways of creating value out of the capabilities provided by that. What's the developer angle here for Splunk? >> Great question. We actually are focusing a lot on developer tools. So Splunk, being a platform. I always say Splunk is a full-feature platform for machine data and big data. So it's open in the sense that developers can develop their own content on Splunk. They can extend what we have. So an example of that is, the recent project called Mexico Contaro. So that's a project full that's looking at internet usage and coverage on Mexico, in Mexico City and across all the cities. And this was using Splunk to end Meraki API's, and bring all that data together, and network data to try to give exposure to kind of like government analytics. And that's a neat case because not necessarily only IT, but also helping all the goods out there. >> So Cisco, Meraki and other sources, plus Splunk to be able to get deep visibility into a number of ways, you know, a very complex system like Mexico City, which is about as complex as you get, actually operates. >> Wissam: Yes. That's one, yeah. >> Tell about the Splunk direction now, because everyone's been questioning about the public offering, because you're not putting numbers out there, active community, it's not that you guys aren't being transparent, but you've got to go to the next level of growth. Obviously Cisco's coming at the cloud native world. We see the cloud native compute foundation, really with great support of the Linux foundation. New open source stuff's going on all the time. How is Splunk looking at the future right now? What's next? I mean obviously security, we heard that at Dot Conf last year, but you guys have really a good position with the data. You have good account names. You've got great blue chip customers. What's next? What's the product solution look like for you guys? What's the new architecture? What's the new plan? >> I think more listening, looking at all the scale, and cloud and listen to the customers, making the data onboarding easier, making it more scalable, covering more use cases that we talked about. Innovate a lot of areas around machine learning, all that to cover more of the use cases, so we're definitely moving forward to go the next step beyond just-- >> So let's take another example. So DevOps, right, everyone loves the DevOps. It's not like a solution, you can't buy DevOps, you just got to do it, right? So that's pretty clear. You can't just write an Agile manifesto and say, "We're DevOps." You got to have a vision, maybe write a manifesto just to get the people motivated, but put the right people in place, let the things organically develop. So the question is, what is an ideal architecture, and what is a best practice, from your standpoint, where you've seen examples of people who've transformed into this DevOps world, where they really got the ball rolling, got some change happening, and then scaled it. Can you give us a kind of a pattern that you've seen the customers? >> I have not seen personally a lot of that, but definitely there's transformation happening. It's not easy to move into that DevOps switch. You cannot do it overnight. So you need as much as possible tools that would actually give exposure, how am I doing, right? Am I pushing my code at the speed it's expected to be? Do I have bugs addressed early on? So that kind of exposure you need a system that will give you basically to analyze all that data too, and then at Splunk we have a story on DevOps. DevOps and application exposure monitoring and that. And the unique thing about Splunk is that you don't only look at what's inside the application, which was AMP's that do application management, but you should look at everything, so we look outside the black box. Not inside the app, but look at outside too, so we're going to give you exposure of your whole DevOp process You know, from the beginning, the whole condis integration, so I see Splunk helping organizations moving into that kind of new process. >> But there's an interesting relationship between tools and process, or tools and skills, so John, you'll probably laugh at this. Many years ago I found myself sitting in a room with the CEO of a very, very large pharmaceutical, me and a group of other other consultants, and he said, the discussion was, are we going to buy SAP or not? And after two hours of people arguing about it, he finally said, "Screw it, we're doing it, "I'm sick and tired of these process arguments. "We're just going to do what SAP says in the process." There's a relationship between the practices suggested by Splunk and the types of things that a business actually does in a DevOps sense. What is this, how is Splunk changing the notion of DevOps, and how is now as Splunk extends itself, how is DevOps and new practices and new ways of thinking, altering the way that Splunk delivers capability? >> I mean, we always listen to our customers. And then we've actually been looking at addressing use cases, like on DevOps, from a persona aspect. Like as a DevOp engineer, I won't be able to address this kind of issues, and we listen to that, and we try to address those, not only just by a tool, but also by looking at best practices around that. And sometimes we manifest those through apps. So Splunk can actually, you can publish an app as a developer if you're not happy as a customer, you can modify, take one of our existing free apps, and then modify them cue on process, so we're not kind of specific rigid to certain way, and I know DevOps, and Agile Ward, is not even like a religion, you know, you're not supposed to follow, you're supposed to be flexible in certain areas, and even implementing DevOps comes in Agile way too. >> But it's still pedagogical, and John in many respects, there's your manifesto for DevOps, right? Is your choice of tools and how they come together, and degree to which they're integrated kind of take priority. >> Well, you got eight minutes until you have to go up on stage and do your talk. Here we're live in San Francisco. What are you going to be speaking about when you hit the stage in eight minutes? You have seven minutes to explain (laughs). >> (Laughs) Deliver pitch. So I'll be focusing a lot on the integrations that we have with various Cisco products, so we have, with Splunk you're able to bring in a lot of the API, data through API integrations, so I'm going to show how easy that process is to bring that data if you have an API like Meraki or ACI or Ice. And I'll also be focusing more on how the data you can do it from the cloud, easy, without having an agent involved, without having any software you need to install to collect the data, and we'll be talking more about the Mexico Contaro case, and then do some fun live demos also. >> But Cisco's got good API's, people might not know that, but they are API'd up pretty well on the equipment and the gear and the platform. >> Yes, of course. >> Just commentary on that, your reaction to share for people who are not fluent in Cisco, in terms of their enablement of getting data out? >> Yes, Cisco has a lot of good API's, capabilities around sharing that data, the openness of it has been great, and made easy for us, even for our customers to bring that data, the API, that data into Splunk, so it's a matter of a few minutes now to point to that API and bring that data into Splunk, and yeah, that's good. >> Wissam Ali-Ahmad, going on stage in seven minutes, you got it all done, congratulations. Thanks for coming on The Cube. I know you've got your big speech here to the packed house. Inaugural event here, Cisco's DevNet Create. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> More live coverage here in San Fransciso. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Peter Burris. Stay with us as we get down to wrapping up day two. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior directory of strategy and plan

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. (upbeat techno music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage here in San Francisco for Cisco Systems' inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier sitting with my co-host Peter Burris, Head of Research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jose Bogarin, Chief Innovation Officer, Altus Consulting, VIP here at Cisco DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So tell your story, you have a really special story of true transformation, where DevNet and being a developer in this new world order has changed things for you. >> Yeah, actually people from Cisco call it a rags to riches story. Basically I founded my company 10 years ago with my brother and a friend. And business was going good, but we were having some trouble competing with the larger Cisco partners in Costa Rica. So that's why we decided to do something else and software was the way to go. So three years ago I had the opportunity participate in the first DevNet Zone in Cisco Live in San Francisco in 2014. And that really was a turning point for my company because we actually shifted our focus to the software and software development and that really pushed us forward and really allowed us to compete with those big partners, but also expand our business to some other parts of Latin America. So now we're doing stuff also in Mexico, and doing stuff in Peru, and even thinking about coming to the States and doing some software developing here. >> You're like, taking over the world. So take us through specifically the inflection point. Obviously DevNet, you had an internal compass, you felt that, kind of the tailwind of the marketplace pretty, not obvious to everyone, but you guys saw it. What was the moment where you go wow, we're on to something with this? >> Yeah, it's probably hard to say because it's less, like, different moments. The first one I think is reading Andreessen Horowitz, >> Peter: Andreessen Horowitz? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Peter: The Venture capitalist. >> Yeah reading their blog post about softwares in the world. So that was a blog post in 2011 I think. But we read about it in maybe 2013. And we started thinking, hey, maybe the way to go is actually to do some software by ourselves and figure out if we can actually improve the Cisco solutions that we are selling right now using software. So, we basically used that and then we came to the San Francisco 2014 DevNet Zone and said, hey, now Cisco has a program around this, so maybe yeah, software is the way to go. Maybe software is the way to actually go ahead and innovate, and do some other stuff to better serve our customers. So that's when we actually went back home and doubled down around on our strategy. And started developing more software, and having more conversations with our clients that we were able to solve using Cisco technology and Cisco hardware, but also develop software around it. >> Why did customers resonate with your story? Was it because you had a unique differentiator? What specifically did you do with Cisco that made it such a high impact value proposition? >> Okay, one of the things that I really like about Cisco is they have a very robust infrastructure, but it's sometimes, or you need special integrations to really solve a business need for a customer. So a lot of customers that we had, really had maybe the hardware or the platform, for example the Cisco Contact Center, but there's a gap between having the infrastructure and really solving that business need. So when we got there and told them, hey, maybe we can have those skills, or we are building those skills in our company to bridge that gap, that really made the difference with our customers. And that's our whole business in past three or four years has really been about that basically. >> And so it gave you an opportunity to get into that market and just have good products, great! What was the biggest learnings that you've had over that journey? What's the learnings you could share with folks watching? >> Okay, the first of all that it's a complete shift in your company. If you've been selling hardware, and now developing software. It's two different worlds completely. I don't want to say it's easier to sell hardware, but it's maybe more complicated to develop software. It has to be a whole different process because when you are selling hardware, you're basically doing the design and then just buying the hardware from Cisco and then selling it to your customer. But when you're developing software you have to have your team ready, develop probably three, four, five months, or even six months in advance. And then get that solution to the customer. So it takes a while and you have to change all your business, you have to change your practice. It's difficult. I know that a lot of partners are trying to move in that way and develop more software, but to be honest it's not that easy. You have to have a lot of commitment from management to actually make it. >> But I presume you're developing software not just for the hardware in terms of management, or something like that. Are you also looking at WebEx, and TelePresence, and the full suite of Cisco products as you start thinking about how you're developing solutions for your customers? Is that kind of the direction you're taking? Obviously on top of the hardware. Is that kind of the direction you're taking? >> Yeah, we actually started more around Contact Center and then mainly around collaboration so, WebEx presence and now even Cisco Spark. That was our focus for the first maybe three years and now we're starting to do stuff around networking, like traditional networking like routers, switching, or stuff like AP Key M or CMX for the wireless part, or even Meraki gear. So we started in collaboration but now we're expanding our business to other parts within the Cisco portfolio. >> As you think about this message of how the network, which has now become programmable, so in other words you can use software to define and reconfigure, rapidly reconfigure the network, are you also then seeing yourselves working not just with the traditional network people within the companies you're selling to, but also developers in showing how the network is offering a more superior, or extending the quality of the target that they're writing to as they write software? >> Yeah, and it's quite interesting. And coming from that Contact Center side, our conversations moved from IT to the supervisors and teams supervising the Contact Center, and now going to networking we'll probably have to move the conversations from the operations team now to the development team. So when you start developing software you actually have to go to the line of business, or to teams different from that operational team that you used to talk to. >> I was going to say, that's probably one of the reasons why it becomes more complex. That the change management challenges, and a partner has to fit into those for installing a new switch, or installing a new router is one thing. But the change management practices of going in and evolving the way a Contact Center operates, and I know Costa Rica is one of the places where, at least here in the US, it serves Spanish speaking communities here in the US. That's a pretty significant challenge. There's a lot of change management things that have to happen there. To be dragged into those is not a trivial exercise, but it also points up the need for more intelligent, higher-rope, more easy to manage, more robust types of networking interfaces. Where do you see the network going as a resource for developers to hit? >> I can say that it has to become easier to program the network because right now you have a lot of technologies, but they're still not there yet. You still need a lot of network background to actually use them, and some of them are not very flexible. So those technologies need to evolve for the developers to actually use them. And I see that coming in the next few years and Cisco's made a lot of progress in that. And also what we're seeing it's that need to improve the analytics and information that you can get from the network. And again Cisco, for example, has made a lot of progress in that. >> John: Well, AppDynamics. >> Exactly. With things like AppDynamics, or for example, APIs like Data in Motion, or the whole thought computing process that they have and that needs to improve for the developers to actually start getting more use out of it. >> What's next for you now that you see DevNet Create? They're puttin' their toe in the water, doing a good job here. First inaugural event. Does this have legs, this event? Yeah, yeah, I've seen it. I wasn't there during first DevNet Zone in 2014 and I've seen the growth from 2014 to 2015 in San Diego, and then Vegas, and then Vegas this year. So I've seen that grow in the DevNet Zone. I'm completely confident that the DevNet Create is going to get bigger and bigger in the coming years because I've seen how other teams, networking teams, operational teams, like people from Data Center, traditional like computer teams, they're starting to get more interested in software development and events like this. >> So based on your first signals of the first year of DevNet, which you walked in and transformed your business, you feel a similar vibe here? >> Oh yeah, yeah, totally, yeah, completely. You get that vibe of people learning, people start to say hey, Cisco's really actually sponsoring this and is actually putting their money where their mouth is. They're actually investing-- >> And the content's good. That's to me, the tell is the content. >> Peter: It's called walkin' the walk. >> Yeah, exactly, they're really, really helping the developers and you can see that. >> Well, let's hope that it translates to the core of Cisco because it's a huge company. The network engineers in the past, their diversion of developer was using Voice-over-IP. Those worlds are over, not over, but they're subsumed by cloud, right. Cloud is changing everything. So what are you most excited about right now as an entrepreneur, recovered, you're back on your way, rags to riches, talk of the town. As you look out on the horizon, the 20 mile stare. What are you excited about that are enabling you to go out and do what you're doing, what technologies? >> Yeah, well probably I know that some of them it's like buzz words, like IoT and cloud and machine learning and even blockchain. But actually having those technologies at hand, and it's not like you have to choose every one of them but actually use them, some of them, to actually build a better product or better service to your customers. It's something that really excites me. And again, it's something that Cisco's really investing in. So getting that traditional Cisco mold, it's like networking or Contact Center and actually improve those technologies with machine learning or some IoT technology, I think that's the way forward. And we're actually doubling down our investment in those technologies. >> Jose, thanks so much for coming on CUBE, sharing your story, I really appreciate it. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you so much. >> Peter: And you've got to get us down to Costa Rica. >> Sure, anytime. >> We've got to get down there. Half of Palo Alto goes down there, so we might as well Peter. (laughing) Seriously, thanks for coming on, great to have you. It's theCUBE live coverage in San Francisco for Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create. Building on the popular, only three year old DevNet program. I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris with theCUBE. Stay tuned for more live coverage. Stay with us after this short break. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy and Plan.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco It's the Cube. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in San Francisco, this is the Cube's exclusive coverage of the inaugural event for Cisco systems DevNet Create. It's an extension or augmentation, a foot in the water of the new open source world for them. Cloud native DevOps infrastructure is code. It's Cisco's new mission, where applications meets infrastructure AKA infrastructure's code which is music to the ears of DevOps and all application developers. I'm John Furrier. My cohost Peter Burris, Head of Research at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Bradley Wong, Director of Product Management at Docker. Bradley welcome to the Cube. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, great, Thanks John. >> Docker, no other company to reference in terms of being a shining star in a paradigm shift or transformation where containers, Docker containers, and now containers and Kubernetes microservices has taken cloud and brought it into a whole nother dimension. We've been covering you guys at all your Dockercon events. It's been gray multiple years. Congratulations for your success. >> Bradley: Thank you. >> You got to be happy that you got Cisco coming out saying hey we're going to make the network programmable. Finally! You know, let's do it. Thoughts? >> Yeah, we're very excited about that. It's kind of interesting because we also found that networking is also one of those things that's quite difficult. And we saw this challenge probably about more than two years ago, after people started to get more comfortable with containers and they wanted to start doing some more interesting things with them and start getting the containers to talk to each other and the rest of the world. That's kind of really where we saw that networking could be improved upon. And I think maybe you remember, probably about two years ago now, maybe more actually, we made an acquisition company called SocketPlane? >> John: Yep. That really helped us define what it means to really do networking properly. And that was actually the genesis of where even the Cisco partnership also started devolving as well, because at Docker we really needed to build out a framework for how to do networking properly internally first. And we always followed a mantra, the mandate of batteries included but swappable. So, we built a reference implementation of what it meant to do networking properly for containers. But, in doing so we also then worked quite closely with Cisco to also bring their many, many years of expertise to the table as well. So, and you can probably see that now with the culmination of projects like Contiv, which is actually now a certified plug-in on Docker store. Cisco's really stepped it up and has really made lots of really great inroads and done a lot of good additions to Docker networking. >> It always seems that way. The conversation, we've been also following a lot of other communities, like OpenStack for instance, there's always debates but it always gets down to ay the network, network. I've had so many customers (mumbles) It's really hard. And also you see Cisco get pulled into conversations just but gravity pulling them in because they're the network guys. So now, it's nice to see that the executives at Cisco, led by Susie Wee and the team and Rick, not just puttin' their toe in the water, they're jumpin' in the deep end here with the cloud native approach by going to developers and outreaching to them in a different way and saying look it, we want to make your life easier. >> Bradley: Absolutely. >> That's what you guys have done. So certainly a success to you guys who are in Cisco, doing the work around the fringes but now that they're coming in, how do you, how would you tell someone, describe that move for Cisco? I mean, obviously Cisco has not been absent. They've been there with you guys. >> Bradley: Yeah. >> What does this really mean for them as they go fully committing here now? Right, that's a good question. Cisco is beyond just a, obviously, a networking company that's kind of' where it's roots came from. But we saw that there was some good opportunities to work with Cisco, not just on networking but a few other things. I think what a lot of people probably get familiar with Docker because it's a great development tool to start. And that's really where people's first interactions with Docker really is. It's really easy to get started, really easy to start building your applications in Docker, and start moving those applications into other environments, like going from Dev into Tes into Prod very, very seamlessly. So, Docker really becomes that sort of what we call a software supply chain that really enable Dev and Ops to use the same tooling, the same tool chain, end to end. And we feel that if we're able to use the same tool chain end to end, from Dev all the way through to Ops, we alleviate a lot of the challenges to deploying applications to production. Now, Cisco so far has been very, very strong in the Ops space, very strong in the infrastructure space, and we also come very, very strongly from the developer space as well. So, I think as we basically build out this software supply chain, there also is a need to make sure that there is this kind of underlying infrastructure that's also ready to run that software supply chain as well and to really harden it. And that's what, one of the first things that we really did with Cisco is to make sure that we have a very clear vision of how to make that operationalizable for the enterprise. >> Second time I've heard the word software supply chain. Peter's also used the word data supply chain. Data is asset (mumbles) software. Software is an asset. It's data as well. What is software supply chain mean? Describe that for a second. Take a minute to explain. >> So yeah, that's a good question. So in any supply chain I think there's sort of a progression of where there's inputs, where things come in and for us, we're on a mission to build tools of mass innovation. So, we really want to start with the developer and that's really where a lot of really good stuff comes from. Everyone's got great ideas and we piece those ideas together, give them the tools that they know how to use really well to develop them. But, it's not just good to have great applications, they need to be usable and they need to be able to be deployed. And what we believe the software supply chain is taking that development process and being able to have developers put their artifacts inside containers and then move those, because that's really what it is, it's actually moving those artifacts into places where they can be shared with greater teams to start testings those and to start iterating on those. And ultimately to move those into production whether it's on premise or whether it's in the cloud. And that's what we believe that we enable, is that movement of, and that >> John: Coding motion. >> Exactly. Exactly. And that doesn't stop there because, as you know, code is not stable. There's always iterative process and we enable that as well. So then , as we find issues or enhancements that we want to fix in production, we move that back to developer and that whole process starts again. Be able to do that really, really, quickly is what we want to do. >> So let's stay in that metaphor for a second. If we think about this as a software supply chain, Does that make Cisco a logistics supplier? >> I would say, with any supply chain, Cisco, once again, has lot's of different areas that they're focusing in and by no means am I speaking on behalf of Cisco where >> Peter: I understand. Just conceptually, are they the Ryder trucking, are they the ones responsible for moving things around? >> Yes, that's one of the places that Cisco does play very, very strongly in. For example, we identified that the computer platform that Cisco has, the UCS platform, is a great place to actually run Docker in production, especially on premise. And that's definitely one of the things that we needed to start validating, all these different infrastructures, that can actually have the right availability, the right performance characteristics, and things that then we can do together to make sure that these are essentially solid infrastructures to actually run these production environments on. Now, Cisco's been running solid enterprise infrastructure for many, many years. Docker's been running Dockerize applications also for many years as well. The marriage of the two, we hope and we believe that will culminate in a lot of the enterprises, which were very accountable at running enterprise applications on top of enterprise infrastructure, to now run Docker applications on enterprise infrastructure as well. So, just making sure that there is very, very good infrastructure that's in place to actually host that supply chain, I think that's definitely one of the key areas that we are hoping to get out of this partnership with Cisco. >> So now that we've talked about here in the last couple days (mumbles) is Conway's Law. And I'm sure you're familiar with Conway's Law. >> Bradley: Right. >> Which is basically the observation that the software that's generated is a reflection of the organization that generated it. You can use Docker or any other container technology to create really crappy software if you want to. >> Bradley: Yep. But one of the things that Docker does introduce is the idea of segmentation, compartmentalization, while at the same time simplified mechanics for how things work together. So talk a little bit about the expectations of people who get into the Docker and container world should have of the network. How should they think about, should they think about their software as essentially distributed elements that then require a network? What's your thoughts on that architecturally? How is it going to play out? >> It really depends on where their journey sits. Once again, I think we are the suppliers of these tools of innovation. But we want to also hold their hand as well through this journey. And that journey is not done day one. It's a step by step process as well. So, a good example is you can start off and build the greatest distributed microservice application and that might work well for certain parts of your company, but there's certainly many, many other applications that are already deployed out there, which it may not fit, at least not today, and there's a journey to take those existing, traditional applications along that journey as well. So, anything that basically requires interaction, with other components, any services that need to talk to each other, to the external world, obviously requires a network. Networking has been a very, very tough thing in the past. They're not always the simplest. Sometimes it could be over complicated. >> Peter: Sometimes? >> (laughs) Many, Many times. >> In all honesty, I do think that the network professionals have gone out of their way to make the network as obscure and abstract as possible. >> Bradley: You know, I think >> John: They're command line guys. Come on. (laughs) >> I've been in the networking world for a long time as well, before joining Docker. So, I see some of that. I think networking guys tend to, and girls, tend to really look at what are all the different things that we can do, all the different little knobs that we can actually tweak to squeeze every little bit of performance, convergence time, things like that, that might work well in some environments but may not others. That's why you needed so much variability, hence all these nerd knobs, so to speak. Docker comes from a very different place. If you look at the mentality of how we drive things, Usability is a very, very key thing for us. We talk about usable security, we talk about simple orchestrator, (mumbles) for example, We forgo the complex to focus on things that are usable. So, networking for us, we wanted to initially look at it and say, networking should be something that's simple and usable and essentially get out of the way of the developer. Developers shouldn't have to think about all these overcomplicated concepts. The network should be able to form its way around what the application needs and that's really what we're thinking about there. >> Peter: Make it simpler and no simpler than it needs to be. >> John: And make it programmable. >> Bradley: And make it programmable as well. Simple and programmable. And when I say programmable, we're not expecting Ops folks to have to learn how to code necessarily. I think if there's the right tools that are available, that should be a natural flow on. >> You have to enable it so that the app developer doesn't have to do all the hard stuff, like configuration management, all the hardware and the operational stuff that the networking guys have done for them. >> Bradley: Right. >> 'Cause they're not Ops guys right? They're Devs. >> That's a really good point because today, there is not really one single tool chain, and coming back to my earlier point, of what we're trying to solve for. There's not really one single tool chain that Ops folks use, and application developers use. They traditionally use different tooling. What we're trying to do is, first to have that common foundation of common tooling that people can converge on. And the second then is, if we provide all the right hooks, so, just enough hooks for the application developer to say, this is what my application looks like and then enough hooks for the operations folks then plug in and say hey, these are my security policies. These should talk to these and these shouldn't talk to these. And once we have the right ingestion points there, we should be able to take that end to end without having to manually ingest all these different after the fact concepts into that development process. It should be a natural flow on. We're not saying the work is done there. There's still a lot of things to do. But I think the first glimpse of what we have there is stunning. Docker, as you may know, has some great tools to define what an application is. Docker Compose, for example, you can see how a multi-service application is laid out. Cisco can actually then, provide plug-ins into that composed (mumbles) and say well, this web tier needs to talk to this application tier, and these are the basic premises of what networking security tools can then plug into to enforce policy. So, we feel that that can be a lot more automated. And we'll work towards that. >> Bradley, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. Great to see ya again. And Docker obviously continuing to do great and we'll continue to cover all your events. But my final question for you is, Take a minute to just explain quickly and succinctly for the audience, the Docker Cisco relationship. What is that? I mean, joint partnership? Is it, you guys just hi fivin' each other? You actually writin' code together? Is there a technology partnership? Give some details on the relationship. >> Yeah, sure. It's a strategic partnership, which basically means that it goes beyond just hi fiving each other. There's some of that as well but we believe that any relationship of this size needs to be built on solid attainable things. So, we worked on the Contiv project together, for example. We also worked together on what we call Cisco validated designs for Docker. >> John: Just joint engineering. >> Joint engineering work. We also work on joint marketing and joint go to market motions as well and joint support. So, you can actually call up Cisco for a Docker, Cisco solution that's deployed out there, you can call up Cisco support and they will hold that trouble ticket and if any troubles do arise, they take the call and then work on that on behalf of us. >> It's a nice relationship. It's a win-win. They get some cloud native mojo with Docker and this new app world. You guys get enterprise access to the huge amount of clients that they have. >> Bradley: Exactly. Alright, final, final question, Since one just popped in my head. It always happens that way when you're going to roll. But, what's on the roadmap for you guys with respect to the Cisco and this DevNet Create, obviously is going to their foray into this new world and bring in a new eco system with DevNet their core application, I mean, their core developer community, What's on the Docker roadmap? What can we expect to see that's going to be fruits of the labor? >> I think one of the things that we're definitely going to be focusing quite a lot on is to look at that first step of that journey, which is even taking, not just the microservices, that everyone loves to talk about, but even the traditional applications, those monolithic applications that are already deployed out there running mission critical enterprise workloads on there, We want to take those, together with partnerships, like Cisco, and Dockerize those. And eventually, modernize them and eventually evolve them into microservices. >> Yeah, might get those mission critical apps microservicized if that's a word. (laughs) Bradley Wong, Director of Product Management, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Live coverage at the Cube here at the Cisco's inaugural event. Again, great show. (mumbles) I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. More analysis and commentary and interviews after this short break. (robotic music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural DevNet Create event targeting the DevOps open source community as they put their toe in the water, their foray into a community approach to build on top of their success of their classic developer program, DevNet, which is only three years old. Shouldn't call it classics. It's actually emerging still and growing. Arnesc is our pitch, Joshipura GM, Network and Orchestration at the Linux Foundation. I'm also joined with my cohost Peter Burris. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you again, welcome back. Cube alumni. Obviously open networking. You guys are involved, you're having a great show, we cover it every year. Open Networking Summit, among other things. Huge demand for the technologies. An appetite for content in your area. Here at Cisco DevNet Create, you're seeing the emergence of Cisco taking their roots in networking and plumbing and operations, which, by the way, you know from the networking world. Sacred cows all over the place. Bringing it to the wild west, agile developer who wants infrastructure at Cisco is bringing that application meets infrastructure saying, we're going to bring programmable networking. That's music to the ears to the developers so we are getting infrastructure as code. That's your wheelhouse. What's going on in the Linux Foundation to continue this momentum? How do you guys look at this trend, give us the update on how the Linux Foundation is participating, supporting, getting involved with this programmable networking infrastructure as code trend. >> Sure. So first of all, let me baseline everybody. Linux Foundation is here to create the largest shared technology investment by building sustainable ecosystems. That's the mission in life. Within the Linux Foundation obviously the most successful open source project is Linux. But we're way beyond Linux. We host a whole set of open source projects starting from cloud native, CNCF, cloud foundry to blockchain projects like hyperledger, automotive grade Linux and a whole variety of Let's Encrypt, you name it. That we facilitate this shared technology investment. The area I own, which is networking, has several projects up and down the stack. All the way from data plane acceleration to orchestration, analytics and it's intended for carriers, enterprise, and cloud service providers including one of the most recent, highly successful and much in demand project called ONAP which is a full network automation stack. Open network automation platform. Which again, is an open source way to connect apps to infrastructure. This is the movement that you just mentioned and I'm really excited that the community's finally realizing the implications of the three letter acronym that started this whole thing called SDN. (laughing) >> SDN, SD when, a lot of stuff going on. Software defined, data center, obviously Cisco has a huge dominant preposition in the enterprise, data center in particular, but also they have a huge service provider business MSL. All that, they've been connecting networks on internet scale since the '90s. Really doing a great job. Now they got to really think about the future. What's your view there because I think Linux Foundation, you guys have been great stewards for sustainable ecosystems, but now Cisco has to put their toe into the new ecosystem. What's the meaning of that? What's the view, outlook? What's your take on where they're at? It looks good off the tee, middle of the fairway as we were saying earlier. Messaging's good, 90% of the content's community, agenda's relevant, looks good. >> I think our perspective is there's a major disruption happening. But it's not a technology disruption, it's an end user disruption. What I mean by that is the end users, whether it be carriers, whether it be enterprises whether it be cloud service providers, they are demanding that open source be part of the agenda. The reason for that is very simple. It's providing more agility, providing the access to the source code to allow for much faster feature development. They want to contribute, they want to develop the ecosystem to meet their requirements and everybody is unique as we all know. What is happening is, in this new environment, vendors, service providers, carriers, everybody is re-inventing themselves. They're re-inventing themselves with a new business model and the business model is essentially, how do I take a leadership role in developing this shared technology investment? It's not about a box. It's not about the fastest and the smallest and the largest switch routers, etc. It's about a software plan. >> It used to be about free software. Now, nothing's free because people are putting their company's name on the line. Their business models now are integrated to open source and they have people involved in other parts so technically it's free software but it's really, technically not free. But this is the new business model, this is what people are doing. >> I think you can-- >> It's tier one resource. >> If you look at the world's largest carriers today, whether it's in China, whether it's in US or in Europe, they have deployments that are built on open source. Open source networking specifically is becoming mainstream in terms of deployment. >> What's the hottest mainstream product right now? Is it SDN? What's the hottest in the-- >> SDN is a technology. SDN, NFV, network function virtualization. Those are technologies that enable the deployment of open source projects. We got projects like Open Daylight, ODL, OPNFV, ONAP, these are just names. Again as networking-- >> What's the hottest here, NFV or-- >> Right now ONAP is the hottest. As networking guys we always make these three or four letter acronyms so sorry to bug you. >> That's okay I don't mind. >> But that's how it is. >> So one of the observations at least we made at Wikibon and we made it here a couple times, is that open source has proven to be magnificently successful when the target is well defined. Other words, conventions of an operating system, there's no disagreement about what an operating system does. Hence open source could create a Linux that has just been wildly successful. Open source has not been as good at redefining the new use cases or where the technology might go. Therefore, a lot of times open source developers end up looking at each other and making each other's tools work. Which is, for example, in the big data universe, restricted the adoption of Aduke and the ability of Aduke for example. So getting value you out of it, but it's not as successful as it might be. That raises a question. I'm wondering what role you play in all this. Is there a need for a degree of open source leadership that can set the big picture, the longterm trends without undermining the innovative and inventive freedom of how developers have demonstrated they want to work together? What do you think? >> I think that's an excellent question. What happens is just by throwing software on say, Github, doesn't make you an open source project. I mean yeah, it does make you open source but that doesn't make you a successful open source project. You need a community behind it. You need a community of developers and a sustained ecosystem. One of the things we are championing, and I'm personally driving that agenda, which is thought leadership on how do these pieces fit together. As we are moving from components that were disagregated in networking to production ready software components, to production ready solutions, these all need to fit together and developed in its entirety. When you look at it holistically, from a solutions perspective, the most important thing that matters are use cases. So what we have done-- >> Totally agree. >> What we have done is for every project, strategically, when the requirements are laid down, I think of that as a requirements document. Or when the architecture is laid down. The end user use cases are explicitly defined for the community. The architecture is laid out. In that framework, the Linux Foundation facilitates the developments, the infrastructure the devOps, the agile model to come and co-create this technology in this area. >> So that's how you're doing the ideation. Are you then taking that and stepping up and also doing some of the design work? And it sounds like you are. >> We facilitate the community to do the design work, we give them architectural part leadership, we give them inter-project cross-leadership. For example, we have, in my group, in networking we have about 11 plus projects. There are multiple data plane acceleration projects. When you're putting a solution, you want portion of data plane acceleration to ride on a control plane, to ride on orchestration, to be tested end to end. Projects like OPNFV for example, they test all the pieces. They test things like FDIO, which is an acceleration project, they test open stack. Which again, it's not Linux Foundation but we do bring all the pieces together. Effectively the end user has it relatively easy to adopt and start installing. >> Congratulations, I saw that the Linux Foundation recently hired Sheryl Chamberlain as the Chief of Staff. Cube alumni been on many times, shout out for Cheryl. So you guys are growing. How are you guys handling the growth? I want to get your thoughts and you don't have to speak for the whole foundation but in general, for the folks not necessarily familiar with the inner workings of the Linux Foundation, like open source, you guys are always evolving and growing. How are you serving your stakeholders, your members and taking care and maintaining the sustainable ecosystems? >> The difference between a typical, throw the code up on GitHub versus actively managed, sustainable ecosystem is where Linux Foundation comes in. What we provide to projects in different capacity, is everything from IT as a service, marketing as a service, program management, thought leadership, executive directors, PR, media, and most importantly, events, global events to get the word out. All of that service, if you may, is what facilitates the community. Once the community is all coming together, things happen. I'll just give you an example, we just completed a developer summit on one of the projects called ONAP. Ran out of capacity, clearly. 200 people from world-wide, top-notch architects got in a room and they discussed how to merge almost 15 million lines of code. And they figured it out in four days. >> Over coffee. >> Not over coffee, it's like four days. >> I'm kidding (laughing). >> But they figured it out. I think that level of facilitation that we can provide, because you can't have it on a blank piece of paper. You need some framework, some governance, some model and some processes on how to do it. That's what Linux Foundation excels at. >> I want to move into the third area I want to discuss with you, us. You mentioned the three major customer and end users. Carriers, enterprises, cloud service providers. How do you guys relate and serve those customers when there's other stuff going on in the industry? We see Open Compute, Facebook's doing a lot of stuff, Google's throwing in a ton of open source. We have yet to see Amazon make their move with donating really good networking stuff. Certainly we've seen some machine learning out there, but, we're expecting to see an arm's race of presents coming in. It's like open bar at the hotel. More goodness is coming in from the big guys sponsoring great code. >> My mission is this year, at least, one of the things I've laid out at ONS this year was to harmonize the ecosystem. And harmonization doesn't mean merge it all so now we're one solution. Harmonization means understand where each other solutions interwork, inter-operate. If they overlap, we end up merging the projects, like what we did for ECOMP and OpenAL. That's one of the missions. Now in that process, we're looking, not just within the Linux Foundation and in my role, but also outside. That includes not just the software stacks, but also the hardware infrastructure layers. That would be OCP, that could be TIP, etc. And several others that are coming up. As well as harmonization with standards bodies. We believe that standards and open source coexist and there is a complimentary relationship there. We've been actively working with several of the standards. MEF, Team Forum, etc., etc. Trying to get a view. We just published a white paper on the Linux Foundation website on harmonizing standards on open source. There is a whole movement of ecosystem because at the end of the day, a carrier wants to solve a problem. They don't care how we solve it. I mean they do but not in a fragmented sense. And that problem is different from what an enterprise wants to solve and it's different from what a cloud. Now to your earlier question, the great news is cloud carriers and enterprises, they're looking and smelling the same as cloud native apps, cloud container networking and open source networking, they're all start combining, coming together. >> So I want to share with you a comment we had the other day. There's a story of the four wolves that were put into Yellowstone Park and changed the ecosystem cause Yellowstone had a river problem. So they injected four wolves into the ecosystem. Turns out, the deer went away, things started growing, and the whole ecosystem became so much more sustainable. Not that I'm trying to get at who's the wolves, but balancing and coexistence is the point here. You can live with wolves and not get eaten, unless you're their target. But there's a balancing act on ecosystems. And to have a good, sustainable ecosystem you need to have freshness, certainly standards and new blood, new ideas. What is your vision on coexistence because this is one of those things that we're seeing right now emerging, less about my project's better than your project. You're seeing a lot more collaboration going across communities. >> Correct. >> More than ever. >> A hundred percent agree. I think the fundamental problem has always been only the technical geeks understand the differences between the projects. And then the layer of abstraction in people, whether it's management or media, they start looking and feeling as if they are competing. I'll give you an example. In the data plane acceleration kit, we have projects like FDIO, DPDK, Iovisor, OVS, there's lots of projects there. And people like, oh my god, there's so many. Well, guess what? One of them is a kernel driven thing, other one is a set of libraries, third one builds on the libraries. So that level of understanding is missing. >> John: Interplay between all the projects. >> It's interplay. >> Peter Burris: And dependency. >> And dependencies. So that's one of the things that we want to highlight here, very significantly this year in terms of just sheer education. Because part of the coexistence is understanding each other. If we understand each other on what role each of the projects play, it's easy. Whether it's Linux Foundation or outside. So that's the first step. The second step is if they're complimentary, I want to take the next step and test them out for inter-operability. Because now you have put two pieces together. Remember, networking was a fully black box five years ago. >> Literally. >> We took it, blew it up, fragmented it, dis-segregated it, and now we got to pull... And we got tremendous innovation out of each of these layers. We were very successful on the whole disaggregation and SDN disruption. Not it's time to put it into a production ready solution. As we put those things in, we'll see that harmonization is going to play a big role. >> Arpit great to have you on here, sharing the insight. Always great to get the inner workings plus a great perspective on the industry trends and congratulations on your success and we'll continue to follow you and all your work in the networking area, all the projects Stu Miniman and team. We're going to continue to see you at the Open Networking Summit, among all the great shows. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on, live coverage here in San Francisco, as part of our exclusive two day coverage of the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create event. I'm John here with Peter Burris, we'll be back with more after this short break, stay with us. >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director

(electronic music) >> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Cisco's inaugural event. First time they're having DevNet Create, an extension of their classic DevNet program. I guess not so classic, Peter, it's been only three years. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and here my co-host, Peter Burris, general manager of Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jim Bugwadia who is the founder and CEO of Nirmata startup. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. >> So, thanks for coming on. First question before you get started, what do you guys do? Take a minute to talk about what your company does, and why are you here at Cisco DevNet Create. >> Right. Yes, so Nirmata is a SaaS for cloud application delivery and management. So what we do is, you can think of us as a logical layer above the big three cloud providers as well as private clouds, and we provide a common set of application services for developers who are looking at multi-cloud use cases, and even edge computing moving forward, to provide a common layer. >> I was just covering SAP Sapphire last week, again, on multi-cloud again coming out. Multi-cloud is the hottest trend right now in terms of what people are seeing. And that makes a lot of sense. No one cloud is going to win it all. There's never been a winner-take-all, Jerry Chen at Greylock said that many years ago. Turns out he's right. However, you got the big cloud guys lining up. The question is, multi-cloud, is it reality yet? Or it's just hybrid IT, hybrid cloud, just the stepping stone to potentially a multi-cloud world. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, good point, and hybrid is certainly the stepping stone but what we're seeing more and more is the application sort of being chosen to go on one cloud or another. So it's not at a point where we're seeing the same application span multiple clouds but based on the workload, based on the application type, enterprises deciding whether to put them on private cloud, public cloud or a choice of public clouds. >> So, define multi-cloud real quick. Take a minute. So let's get your definition of what is multi-cloud. >> Right, so to me it's a combination of being able to choose your infrastructure services primarily, and being able to have a portable set of application components and constructs which can span either these public or private cloud deployments. And today of course it's a lot of momentum towards public cloud but private cloud is also going to continue to grow and will continue to grow for various reasons. So having that choice of deployment is really what we're seeing as multi-cloud today. >> And of course put a plug in for Wikibon and Peter's research. They just put out on a new true private cloud report and they had it pegged at a market of what? 260 billion? >> For a true private cloud, yeah! >> For a true private cloud, yes. So you're right true is going to be big. >> And John, just another point. We are actually doing a multi-cloud crowd chat tomorrow at 9 a.m. Pacific. So, anybody that wants to participate in a crowd chat about multi-cloud, 9 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. >> Okay, good plug, check it out Crowdchat.net, check it, it's going to be right there on the front page. You should get on that Jim. But I want to ask you to go to the next level. Multi-cloud, let's peel the onion a little bit. Does that mean I can run workloads on any cloud, or do I put a workload on one cloud and then I put another workload on another cloud. Or, can this workload, if the capacity is bad, move over to another cloud. It just smells like a latency problem to me. It just seems like ungettable at this point. What's your definition, is that multi-cloud? What is multi-cloud? >> Yeah, so what is happening in the developer space of course with the big adoption of containers and the push towards containerizing applications, now we have that ability to rapidly spin up services as needed on different cloud platforms. And really, a cloud becomes a place where you can have a container host and an end-point for deployment. So you combine that with management services, application management services like Nirmata, and now you do have that choice of being able to set policies either based on demand and scale or usage, or based on recovery from faults in the infrastructure to span different clouds from the same workload. >> Okay, next question for you. Great to have you on, great subject matter expert there. Thanks for answering the questions. But this one is a little bit different. If I want to secure cloud, with say Amazon, put my stuff there. You've seen mostly Test/Dev, and the Oracle CEO talks about this all the time . It's pretty much all Test/Dev. Okay that ship has sailed. Pretty much no brainer. What percentage of the workloads now, or what workloads specifically are going beyond Test and Dev that you've seen that are going into production. Because now with hybrid, it opens up more range of apps beyond Test and Dev. So certainly Test/Dev is happening, we get that. Low hanging fruit. What's the next level? >> Yeah, so I think the one way to categorize it is systems of engagement and systems of record of course. So we're seeing anything public facing whether it's mobile, web-app properties, web applications, more and more micro-services style SOA applications. Those are the next wave that's going to cloud. Data residence tends to stay with private cloud for a longer term. But even that, over time we're seeing with VPC is, with the right security constructs, being a viable public cloud, being a viable option there. >> One of the top questions we have in our CrowdChat community, that comes up all the time around DevOps. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this. What advise would you give to operations practitioners who are afraid DevOps is going to automate away their jobs. >> Jim Bugwadia: Yeah (laughing) So, yeah, great great question, and that's very far away from the reality. What's happening with DevOps is now we're getting to a better definition of what Devs need to be concerned about and what Ops needs to be concerned about, right?. And again pointing to containers as one of the enablers, microservices as another. We're seeing where application developers want to operate their own applications. They want control of their destiny. But the furthest thing from their minds is to worry about IP addressing and security concerns and things like that. So there is, and it's interesting, because enterprise DevOps is very different than what you would find in a start-up or in a cloud or internet giant, right. And there is no mythical enterprise developer who can do all of this themselves. You need a Dev and you need an Ops. >> The mythical mammoth kind of goes out of the window. We had CMO, EVP earlier on. We had, it was Matt Howard, and he is an experienced guy. But he was saying, 100 developers have ten IT supports and one security person. He sees that completely flipping around. So if you take this whole notion of the jobs are going to go away. Which I think is BS. Certainly things have to be automated, machine learning is great for that. But you can see the shift happening. There're certainly more security guys. More operational IT guys not doing escalation, doing actual, real IT. So I think, there's going to be a shift of jobs. So you might be displaced functionally. You're a plumber, now you you're a machinist. I get that. Where are the hot jobs? If that's the case, if you believe, which I think you do. >> Right >> Where are they going to shift to, what does the job profile look like. >> Yes, much like we're seeing even in software development itself. The level of abstraction and the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed, keeps increasing. So it's more similarly in operations what we're seeing, like you mentioned, rather than being something, doing something at a low level. Now its understanding what are the best policies for, let's take security as an example, in AWS, in Azure, in private cloud. How do you now make sure you have the right visibility and governance with things like containers, microservices, where the applications are so dynamic, it cross various environments. So it is a transformation in the type of role and skill-set, and I think it's for the better. Because now you really have time to step back and look at this holistically and contribute back to the business. >> Here's a philosophical question for you, and may be Peter you could weigh in too. What single misperception about DevOps would you like to see change out in there? As people try to grasp DevOps, we hear it's a movement, we hear it's a playbook, with this, it's an Agile Manifesto, grow organically, you know, Conway's Law, All kinds of stuff we've been talking about so bottom line, what is the most misunderstood or misperceived issue about DevOps >> Yeah >> That you would like to see changed. >> Yeah, so to us, the one issue that we always emphasize is there will be a Dev and there will be an Ops. And any product that tries to minimize one role or another is not a good fit for enterprises. So, what's needed is a transformation of that Ops role to the role, from just being the direct service provider, the hands-on ops person to more of a governance curation. In some ways an architect type of role, right? And that's what we're seeing, is that Ops role is not diminished. It's actually heightened and highlighted. >> John Furrier: Great point! >> We've already talked about it in 6many respects, the idea that we're going to go from application development to pushing a button and having the business suddenly run differently is just silly. At the end of the day-- >> You think people think that's what DevOps is? Just a magical, rub the bottom and the genie pops out. >> There is a lot of people that think that DevOps is a step on the path to no Ops. To having no people involved in operations at all. And that's just not going to happen. >> So you believe that Ops is still going to be relevant. >> I think Ops is always going to be relevant. I think that Dev is going to evolve to better understand, and have greater data and visibility on what's going on in Ops. And Ops going to have greater predictability in what's going to happen from a development standpoint. So I think we will see a combination of roles. We'll see the productivity of Ops continue to grow. But the idea that this is going to be, that there is magic in here, and Gandalf is going to wave his DevOps-- >> What would Trump say about DevOps? Oh we're great at it! I've done it 10 times! >> What would Trump say? Trump would say, I think Trump would say, "I've never been to Mexico." (laughing) >> I'm going to make it amazing. We'll build a wall of IT. (laughing) I needed to bring that in, sorry, laughing about Trump earlier with the whole thing going on. Okay. Good point. Some are saying in the community, not no Ops, but new Ops. It's a new kind of Ops. >> Yeah, the way we see it is that what we think of as DevOps is splitting more into functions like application operations, security operations, and infrastructure. So really all three need to be accommodated and they need to work together. And that's sort of how we have built up Nirmata as our private software. >> And there is ops for all three of them. In fact, the last conversation we had John was, and test you on this, is that, it is the inherent quality, or the inherent distributed quality of a lot of the new applications that we're building. Absolutely dictates that we start to parse Ops up differently. >> Jim Bugwadia: Right. >> That it's no longer running it on a single machine or on a single database with a network out in a client server domain. It is inherently distributed and therefore the tasks and the responsibilities and roles associated with the operations side of that are themselves going to be inherently distributed. Which requires new ways of thinking, new conventions, and new tools. >> Jim, I want to give you a final word. Give a plug about your company. Thanks for sharing your insight by the way. Appreciate you answering the questions. What do you guys do and what's up with the company? Talk about the status, the employees, how much funding you have, how much revenue you have, what's your goals. Go lay it all out. >> Yeah, so myself, my other co-founders, our background is enterprise software and we come from a network management background where we build centralized management systems for complex networks, distributed devices, etc. What we saw happening is with cloud applications are starting to mimic that complexity. And as applications move from back-office productivity functions to these hybrid distributed mission-critical, real-life functions that we use day-to-day, there is a need for this enterprise-grade management. So that's the type of centralized management we're delivering as a service to our customers. >> You have to become network of provides so you have to have app management. I mean that's pretty much what you're doing you're bringing network management paradigm to apps versus a monolithic app in some dashboard and now it's all over the place. Multiple form factors, access methods. It's a network in the app. >> It is. Yeah and today the customers are left to cobble together about 12 to 14 different tools correlate data across tools. And what we need to do is move beyond systems with just observe and report. To being able to observe, react and learn, and do things in real-time. >> John: Be actionable. >> Exactly! >> So you guys are simplifying that process. >> Jim Bugwadia: Absolutely. >> And is it a single pane of glass, is it a service, is it a software product? >> It's a cloud service. So you can think of us an overlay across any public or private cloud. And early on, we kind of decided, the best way to deliver infrastructure is as a service and we've learned that in real life. >> People who are doing that are winning. That's what Trump would say, winning. (laughing) He would say, I am going to the data lake swamp. >> Who knows what he'd say. (laughing) >> Of course I couldn't get that in there. Drain the swamp, he didn't get the data lake swamp. >> No I got it. >> Okay, go ahead. >> So we've built Nirmata completely as a cloud service because of that philosophy that we started with. And we want to give developers and DevOps teams the choice of any platform, right? And today it's all about cloud. The edge is also very real. We have industrial IoT customers who are looking at containers. >> Yes, your world is getting your TAM, your total customer market is getting bigger and bigger as every IoT device has data on it. Because data is an asset. It's part of the app. >> I want to bring that up. Just if we have just a second John. >> Yeah go ahead. >> I'm curious because on of the things that we believe is that increasingly the whole concept of digital business is how will data feature as an asset in your business? Especially if we're creating sustaining customers. Totally buy in to the idea of the external view versus the internal view. For customers versus for employees. That for customer side, the engagement side is really driving a lot of this. But at some point in time it makes me wonder if we're going to move from a DevOps orientation to a data ops orientation. Where at the end of the day, the physics of how things run is, where is the data, what saliency to get at it, how do you handle the state of it, etc. Do you foresee a... at least, or an extension of the DevOps concept so the data as an object is something that we act upon, and we understand what role it plays in this whole bringing together a lot of piece parts to create distributed digital systems. >> I think so. Starting point of that, that we're seeing is the split between data services and behavioral services. Look, any form of programming it's all about packaging behaviors and data, right? So whether it's in a programming language, and with object-oriented it was about putting things together in a object. Now with service oriented in microservices, it's the service bound rates. So having the data services and then having the behavioral services separated gives a lot of flexibility. And then being able to move the compute to the data versus the other way around that is also very interesting. So we're working with some partners where we're looking at cross cloud data. Can we, as even services in containers are spun up under one cloud. Can we clone an entire environment into another cloud. Can we migrate some of the data efficiently? Challenges like that. >> Well Jim, we're going to recruit you. I just made a note to ping you for tomorrow's CrowdChat. To see if you could make it or one of your co-founders. Love to get your input at the community as part of sharing insight into this really fast growing, changing world of management with all this complexity. I mean there are more tools out there than ever before. They are all different types, a lot of complexity. So we hope to bring you back in the studio, or have you come in via Skype, or CrowdChat. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage. Cisco's inaugural event, DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music) Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of strategy and planning for--

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live here in San Francisco, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost Peter Burris, general manager of wikibon.com research. Next guest is Damon Edwards, co-founder of Rundeck. He's been on the crowd chats and does event DevOps and the enterprise, the content chair, co-founder of Rundeck, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you. >> First and we've >> Good to be here. been in line chatting away. Quick though from you, Cisco getting into DevOps, the conversation's pretty straight forward. We think it's awesome that they're doing this. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Good direction, right in line with DevOps, things looking good, middle of the fairway. What do you do next? >> Damon: Yeah, I mean ... >> Where does Cisco take the ball from here and take it home? >> You know, I think it's just more of the same. I think that you can't underestimate the split that's happened in the DevOps have and have nots, that sounds kind of odd, but a lot that we talk about are the unicorns, the high flying special built organizations that really grew up with this in the last five to 10 years. I think where Cisco really plays is in the other 99% of commerce of the world, which is the core classic enterprises. DevOps really hasn't made that deep of a dent yet into that, I guess we call it dark IT, right? The rest of the world the people have to deal with 30 years of, in some places, different technology, skills, acquisitions, mismatches, all the legacy, all the bureaucracy of large organizations, and Cisco has a path into that and a voice of authority into that. So happy to see they're putting such emphasis on these DevOps and Agile ideas and help to drive them into that. >> And they got the app dynamics things going down too, that big acquisition. Their slogan is Where Apps Meet Infrastructure. We always just talk about infrastructure as code. They're talking about programmable networking, which is the same thing. We want more programmable. >> Damon: Right. So how do they make that transition to this new operational model? I mean, networks used to be very fragile, set in stone. >> Damon: Yeah. Someone used to joke, "Hey, they're called NoOps," because they would say no to everything from a developer standpoint. >> Damon: Sure. >> How do they transition from NoOps to a new operational model that's agile and adding value? >> The bigger issue here is that Ops is getting squeezed, right, so it's an existential crisis for them. The reason why they were always the no folks is because they're always spending their time protecting that capacity because they're overrun, they're always outnumbered, first of all, then they're being overrun with all these tickets of new stuff coming in plus incidents happening in the middle, the capacity has always been an issue. Now with this new DevOps, and really digital transformation inspired pressure, it's go, go, go faster, open things up. At the same time the same business folks are saying from the other direction lock things down, don't be the next hack. Don't be the next breach. Don't be the next major outage, right? >> John: It's really a lot of pressure It's a pressure cooker. >> Right. >> So they're squeezed. So the biggest with crisis, how do we relieve that, how do we relieve that pressure? And the key technique is to be able to actually allow other people to participate in what traditionally was only operations tasks. If you allow me to go one step ... >> John: Democratization of operations in a way. >> It is, and what they're doing, you see the organizations that really nailed this, they're dividing up the idea of an operations procedure. It used to be everything was in operations. You defined it, you ran it, and you have all security and management audit control over it. In these new ways what they're doing is they're breaking it up into three pieces to say the ability to define these automated procedures, the ability to execute them, and the ability to have that management control and oversight, let's make those in three discrete parts and let's move that to where the labor capacity makes the most sense. By doing that, operations can free up those bottlenecks, start to decouple more, allow the rest of the organization to move a lot quicker and not be in that horrible position of being squeezed to death and having to tell everybody no. >> There's a number of reasons why it's happening. Sorry. One of the key ones is that, and it brings us back to the Cisco conversation we're asking about this, is that is used to be that operations was tied to a particular asset. The server more often than not. And so a single individual could pool all those things together because a single individual, or single group, had control over virtually all the resources >> Damon: Right. >> that were a part of that. Now we're talking about applications that are inherently distributed, and so we can't look at the process of operations in the same way. This comes back to Cisco. Does the world need to think more discreetly about these new highly distributed, deeply distributed, applications differently, and is that going to catalyze the diffusion of more of these high quality DevOps principals? What do you think? >> Yeah, it has to. If you look at the business driver, which is this digital transformation, a lot of people scoff at because it's like wait, is this 1999? You need a website? What are we talking about, right? But you realize what it is is saying all these disparate systems we used to have, right. I could get my cable bill, but it's just online, it's just a PDF of what they send to the printers, right. But now on it, everything I could do when I call up the customer service agent, I want to do it through my phone or I want to do it on my laptop, and that means all those formerly distinct systems that lived in different windows on a customer service agents desktop and after the little things to check the router status blew up, well I'll just talk past it, right. But now it's really going to matter in this digital world. The business is driving that integration, so where things don't live in isolation anymore, and because of that the complexity and this distributed nature of these services is rising. >> John: Yeah. >> And when that that happens, that makes the operations inherently more difficult and just contributes to that squeeze even more and we got to find a way to relieve that. >> Great point and great analysis. That just picked off what we were talking about on our intro package of the redefinition of what a full stacked developer is. >> Damon: Yeah. >> Now full stack implies you're talking about a distributed application model where there's no isolation anymore so you could almost argue that that's going to be obsolete. It's a full horizontal developer. >> Well logic used to be full stack, but how they connect will be different. >> Which just brings up the notion of, okay, things were in isolation >> Right. >> built to the database, now I go down the network, now a whole new developer category potentially is emerging. Do you feel the same way? >> Damon: Yeah. >> I mean, we're speculating. We don't actually know. >> Sure. I mean, if you are Netflix, who prides itself on it's ability to go out, pay top of market, which means they are the top of market, and attract the best talent, only one can win that game. For everybody else in the world, this idea of we're going to have these polyglot, super human, I-know-everything engineers, it's never going to happen. We have to find a way to use our systems and our processes to allow that kind of integration to happen, and allow those people to define the control procedures and policies for the things that they know about, and then allow that all to integrate to where then we can have other folks operate it and run it. Again, that idea of moving those part around to where we can best take advantage of the labor, otherwise you're just ... You're never going to find it. Go to any conference, NASA DevOps Conference, and ask people how many LinkedIn spam messages do you get a day because the word DevOps is in your profile? >> Yeah. >> Everybody just laughs because it's dozens. You're never going to have that idea so you have to build the systems to recreate that full stack capability. >> And have people that have access to be one, rather than super human that becomes democratized at that level. >> Damon: Yeah. >> It's interesting. One of the things that you guys did at the DevOps Enterprise Summit, I know you were in the content chair. >> Damon: Sure. >> I made a note here for my ... Make sure I get this question to you, was I like this thing you guys touched upon. Is DevOps best left to grow organically or is there a growing need slash desire for an agile manifesto? (laughs) The top down, do the manifesto, or organic ... Thoughts? >> Yeah, I'd say no, because what DevOps is is a series of problem state- It's an umbrella over a bunch of problem statements and a bunch of solutions that keeps evolving. This is why the Devs conferences are so interesting because it's practitioners talking about what's worked for them. I feel like at the highest level, if you really need to have a definition, go ahead and read the Phoenix project or the DevOps handbook. They've done a great job of collating all of that, but at the end of the day it's not one thing. It's not a single practice. There's no single thing you can do to say I'm going to transform a major global financial services company into a fast, nimble operation. There is no one thing. It's a series of things that you have to try over and over again. Look at DevOps as a movement where you can learn from practitioners, apply it to your own organization, see what happens, report back, try some new stuff, and so on and so forth. >> So you could basically have a manifesto, but it's really just more of marching orders. Organically, it has to form on its own. That's basically the same. >> I think there already is. >> You could say hey we have a manifesto, but it's not like this is the playbook. You can get >> Damon: There is >> the handbook to learn. >> no playbook. >> Exactly. Okay, cool. Well, appreciate the insight. Let's talk about your business. What do you guys do? >> Damon: Sure. >> What are some of the things that Rundeck's doing that you're the co-founder of? Share a little bit about the company. >> Yeah, Rundeck is at the what is it, it's an orchestration and scheduling platform and it's used by operations organizations. Generally from large startups, but also large DevBox unicorns, but also a lot of large enterprises. What they're using it for is for defining and improving their operations procedures. What happens after deployment? Where do we define all the procedures to manage all these disparate systems, all these islands of automation. Chef and Puppet was the hottest thing around three years ago and now it's Docker and Kubernetes and everything else, and now we still have our old power shelf stuff, our late logic over there, some OpSquare stuff over there, so what are we going to do? We need a way to define the procedures, expand all those and allow people to participate in that operations world so they can relieve that crunch. We see a lot for automating the creative standard operating procedures like classic Runbook automation, with a next generation twist, we'll say, but we also see a lot of self service operations, meaning that let's let other people participate. Let's let developers define these procedures as Rundeck jobs, and then let operations vet them ... >> That's where you're talking about the operational being relieved a bit. >> Yeah, you have to. You can't just say there's one little group here that's going to deploy and run all of these things in this world. We have to let other people participate in that. Not just for deployment, which is big in the DevOps world, but for what happens after deployment that nobody wants to talk about. All the escalations, all the interruptions, all those problems, Rundeck really plays in that area help people to get that under control. >> Damon, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Congratulations on your startup and great to meet you in person. >> Yeah. >> We've had great chats in our crowd chat. You guys have been awesome with Gene Kim and the community that you're involved with with DevOps for the Enterprise Summit, practitioners sharing. That's a great ethos >> Damon: It's a pretty >> That really aligns >> awesome bet, yeah. >> with what's going on in the industry. Congratulations. More Cube coverage here exclusive of Cisco's inaugural event called DevNet Create, an extension of their DevNet core classic network and developer systems at Cisco. This is an open source one. This is out in the community. Not all Cisco, all part of the community. And of course we're bringing it to you with live coverage. I'm John for Peter Burris. Stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi. I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director ...

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello everyone, welcome to day two of theCUBE's exclusive coverage Cisco Systems' DevNet Create, their inaugural event where they're put in the foray into the developer community and the open source community, really looking at DevOps, cloud-native, with data. Great move by Cisco. We're going to analyze it again here on the opening day and review yesterday a little bit and talk about what we think is happening here and give you the take on it, our angle, and extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris for day two, head of research for SiliconANGLE Media, also, general manager of Wikibon.com. Check out Wikibon.com, great research, some free, most of it. The good stuff is behind subscription firewall via client. Check it out. Your business will do great because of it. Peter, quick plug there. Get that out of the way. But, let's talk about Cisco. >> Thank you, John. >> We said yesterday and kind of played out Cisco has an opportunity to transfer and grow their core development community, DevNet, which is only three years old, is very robust, it's the heartbeat of Cisco right now, it's the core constituency for Cisco Systems. We're talking tier one elite networking guys, the plumbers, (laughs) pack it movers, whatever you want to call them, they've been designing networks from internet scale to today, everything from Voice over IP, you name it, they've been doing it and the network has been the center of the action and the data center. It's been the most critical asset for availability, operational support, and stable. But not very adaptive, not very agile (laughing) so, you know, now-- >> Almost by definition. >> And that's the purpose is the network guys drive the network and enable opportunities, but now that shift has happened. It's DevOps application developers are driving change to the network and the big conversation is what does it mean for Cisco? What does it mean for their communities? And we were saying that this is an opportunity to extend. We had the folks first from RedHat on yesterday talking about how when you have things come together, there's opportunities. There could be a collision or there could be an opportunity so, can use data science and computer science come together. That is now big data. That's changed the game in the world. Cisco now has DevOps and networks coming together. Applications and infrastructure. This is an opportunity for Cisco. Your take from yesterday, do you feel it? Do you think it's real? What's your take? >> Well, it's real. Digital transformation's happening and it's happening because people can now do things with data that they couldn't do before and they're starting to. So, that's the base of digital transformation, but the reality is, in a digital business, you're going to be by definition, almost inherently, highly networked. And your ability to move data where it needs to be when it needs to be there to whom it needs to be so that they can consume it, is emerging as an essential capability. But, you're not going to do that manually everywhere. You're not going to do it manually in the infrastructure, it's just too complex. And you're certainly not going to do it manually in the applications. And so, you're absolutely right. Being at that edge, being at that margin between how the network does things, how the network is the basis for very high-quality capability for distributing application componentry and how the data then flows over that network under control by applications is really where the next five years are going to be, a lot of the new value is going to created and it's great to see so many developers here that are actually creating code at a conference that's being sponsored and put forward by Cisco. >> The AppDynamics is certainly a force in function for Cisco. Great acquisition. They paid a pretty penny for it, but it could've been more had they gone public (laughing) given the market that's in. So, AppDynamics comes in, Cisco now has a cloud-native direction, still work to do, but they're doing it in a way that's not all Cisco. They're not coming in with Cisco washing, "Hey, this is Cisco." They're really doing it right. They come in, 90% of the sessions are not Cisco at all. It's all community-based. Is this a working strategy for Cisco? Do you see, and what would you advise them because this is important. They have to do this, in my opinion. I think it's a great move, personally. But now, the innovator's dilemma is DevNet's exploding. You've got DevNet's beautiful community, it's growing. It's growing really fast. But, now you have Devnet Create. What do they do? >> Well, so, let's talk about the AppDynamics acquisition just for a second. As with everything, in talking about a big company acquiring a company of any size, you always have observe and see how it's going to play out, but it's got a lot of potential. One of the places that I think it's got a significant potential is in that AppDynamics, as a technology, does a great job of capturing metrics about application performance on networks and as we think about how the market and technology is going to be reconfigured so that networks can be better, more planful, more predictive about what kinds of things the applications are going to need, being able to surface that kind of data is going to be really, really crucial to setting the next round of conventions and that will lead to the answer of your question. If we think about where the market needs to go, we have full stack developers, we have networks. They talk to each other, but they don't engage in a meaningful way as often as they should and I think it's time for us to start thinking about above layer six, that layer seven, start breaking down layer seven and saying, "Well, that's where that full "distributed stack development's going to take place," so that we can start seeing how data will be reused, application services will be reused, componentry will be reused across a variety of different use cases and having that kind of a new structure defined and laid out so that it is built on the presumption that there's going to be a significant network in a way, in the middle of it, I think is going to be really important. Doing everything with RESTful APIs is really important, but I think the industry needs to get a lot more intelligent about how we're really going to build these things and not just presume that there is no network connection. There is a network connection. There has to be one and we have to build that into the architectures that we put forward in the future. >> So, programmable infrastructure as the DevOps ethos, that's what Cisco's proposing and saying they will and are becoming. I get that. I think that's the winning formula, but let's take that concept with what you just said. You're implying that okay, with now distributed infrastructure at scale, with AppDynamics and other things, the notion of a developer changes 'cause now, Cisco folks and their developer community, now is not just by itself, it's integrating in with the rest of the communities. That changes the notion of full stack developer because when you go hire, "I need to hire "a full stack developer," this stops really at the database or how low does it go? So, I think, you brought this up yesterday, not on camera, but after when we were kind of talking, is that this is an opportunity to reconfigure the new definition of a full stack developer. >> Yeah, I think so, John, and you know, one of the things we did talk about was when Susie was on camera yesterday, was the idea that yes, we can, as we introduce software-defined infrastructure, the infrastructure becomes programmable and so, we now see Cisco, CLI-type people thinking about programming instead of just doing command line work. We see it happening in the server world and the CAD world, et cetera, so there's no question that that notion of programmable infrastructure is becoming very real. What we're talking about is stepping it up and having it be available to developers in new and different ways, but utilizing new conventions that start to suggest that for time purposes, latency purposes, security purposes, think about organizing your application componentry in new ways so that the underlying network and infrastructure can provide even more robust capabilities and more consistent capabilities so that we can see further future ways of integrating these things together. And I think that's where this ends up. >> Interesting point about these network opportunity is that Cisco and networking guys are not a stranger to services. Network services have been around for a while. When you look at what came out of yesterday's conversation and this is consistent with a lot of our CUBE interviews we've done with cloud-native players like Amazon and everyone else like AWS and VMware and everyone else, is everything's a service. So the question that I have for the Cisco world is can they move quickly enough to a services model in this notion of a new network engineer, network developer, infrastructure developer? How well can they get transitioned over while preserving their core base of developers? >> I think they have to, so, and it's a great question and we're not going to have the answer from here, but I think one of the things we do need to start seeing and we're starting to hear rumblings of it is the idea that the network has to become more intelligent in the context of the services that the application developer utilizes that run above it and so, the network doesn't necessarily have to be made explicitly or overtly available, but it has to be intelligent enough so that it can provide new capabilities, new service levels, new security levels, et cetera, in a response to the way the services are invoked in the patterns of operation. You know, in many respects, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, John, I think we used to have infrastructure defined by hardware and that served the industry okay for a long time and in the last 10 years, we started talking about software-defined infrastructure. So, we moved from hardware-defined infrastructure to software-defined infrastructure and that's kind of where we are today with the idea of the network becoming more programmable. I think as a consequence of big data and recognition where digital business is going, where data really is the asset and the idea that we're going to build applications and then find data, we're going to start with data and then, decide what we need to do with that data through big data and other types of things, we're literally talking about, in the next five years, about something that we might call data-defined infrastructure where the data, the characteristics of the data, the location of the data, the way it's used, the way it creates value for the business, having a dominant impact on how the infrastructure gets configured and I think that's a, has enormous opportunity for Cisco. >> Yeah, Pat Gelsinger talks about the software-defined use and that's still part of the VMware strategy. This is kind of where it's going so I'm going to put you on the spot. >> Peter: Uh-oh. >> After yesterday's interviews, what did you learn? What did you walk away that's either net new information to you or something that validates something that you've been thinking about or had been researching and analyzing? >> Well, the first thing I'll note and somewhat self-servicing is Wikibon is known for being at the vanguard. We tend to be a little bit out in front and imagining what, how technology disruption's going to play out in response to the new use cases and business issues and it's always good to talk to people that are smarter than I am to start validating some of our positions. So, we heard a lot of, yesterday, that was pretty strong validation at a technical level and a couple of big vendors that are along the lines of what we're talking about so that was very useful. >> What did they validate? What specifically-- >> well, this notion of, for example, the notion of data-defined infrastructure. The idea that data in the future is going to be seminal to thinking about how infrastructure's intelligent, really configured based on the needs described within the data and the metadata. So, we heard that from a couple different people. Another thing that we heard was that there is a, that this not just, that Cisco's vision here of having developers and network jocks coming together to thinking about what the impact's going to be ultimately on how we create business value out of technology is something that's not just a Cisco pipe dream. We had four or five partners on yesterday, including a number of them who are quite sizable, RedHat, for example, who trumpet and reflect and are promoting similar types of concepts. And the other thing that I heard and I'm particularly going back to the PubNub conversation we had, it's really nice to see technology that is been around for a while, that works well, be really reconceived to be able to do new and different things and in particular, PubNub was talking about a deterministic Pub/Sub network infrastructure. Very interesting stuff, it's going to be really important. And the reason why I think that's important is because the lessons that we've learned in the past are not necessarily dead because we're going through transformation. One of the biggest things that I think we all need to take away from this is that we think about a computer, we think about my iPad, your Mac, a Dell machine, whatever else is, we think about that as computer, we think about a server as a computer, but the reality is, if you think about what we're trying to do through conferences like this is internet-scale computing where we look at the entire internet as a computer. Any data, any process-- >> Network's critical. The network is the essential element of it because that's what weaves the whole thing together and I think what we learned yesterday is the lessons of the past, some are going to be gone and we have to get rid of them, but a lot of them have more to do with business models. This is, we're still talking about computers and we're still talking about computer science. >> Great summary of your learnings. I learned, just to wrap up our intro segment, I learned a couple things. Observations that just popped out at me, one is Cisco has a lot of women in tech, engineers, so that was a very cool thing for me 'cause we always look at our index and theCUBE interviews over the thousands of people interviewed and still, only 18% have been women interviews. (laughing) Do more. That's our kind of passion. But they're smart and they're really knowledgeable and it's really awesome to see great women being featured. Certainly, Susie's a rockstar leader as CTO. The other thing that I learned in talking to Abby Kearns, Executive Director at Cloud Foundry and Dan at Cloud Native Foundation is open source is changing significantly-- >> Peter: It's a fair point. >> And open source communities used to be, "My community, yeah, we're winning!" And it's always been a gamer mentality or win-lose and I think now, with the horizontally-scalable cloud, you're starting to see a cross-pollination of players cross-pollinating and participating in multiple horizontal communities that together, is an expansion of the overall open source ecosystem. I think this is a new next generation dynamic that takes the tier one open source position, which really, it's our generation. We're seeing open source become tier one, not tier two, it's a tier one software where people's business models are now a open source. MuleSoft, these companies going public, multiple IPOs since RedHat just recently going public, I think you're going to see more business models on open source and open source is changing and I think cloud is a big part of that. >> That's a great point, John. And the only thing I'd add to it, since it's a great summary, is that we also heard yesterday that the very notion of leadership in the open source universe is starting to change. As people come up with new business models, they're also exploring with new ways of providing leadership that doesn't violate the basic precepts of open source because if there has been an issue in the open source universe, it's been that open source does a great job of, if you have a convention and a statement about where the product is, like an operating system, open source can do an equal or better job of it. If you start talking about use cases and a lot of business uncertainty and how open source can sometimes spend its time looking at each other, looking at other projects and filling holes in between projects and not getting to that use case. >> We've known for a while, it's not new to us that open source where the innovation is and that's certainly seeing companies have their employees there and that's where recruiting is going on, as well. But, I'm being more specific. I think the changing game in the open source community is going to be one that's going to reflect the structure of the industry and I think Cisco jumping in with this event will change the game in the makeup of open source and the projects because if you believe that the network is programmable, and that the cloud is one big computer operating system, then you have to believe that that's going to be a new domino that drops and falls and I think the impact of Cisco making programmable internet, programmable networks to developers will have a cascading effect that will ripple on and I think-- >> So, you're predicting a lot of new open source projects that Cisco's helped to catalyze. >> I'm predicting some turmoil that could be positive. Again, is it a collision or is it-- >> Peter: Yeah, it is. >> Edges coming together? >> And it's okay. >> John: And that's the chaos theory, you've talked about that. >> It's a good prediction. >> So, I think it's a lot of good stuff. We'll be watching and covering and of course, play-by-play action on theCUBE. More day two coverage on theCUBE after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, after this short break, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCube. Covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco, exclusive coverage with theCube at Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. We're breaking down the new foray into the open source world with a big presence. Cisco expanding their DevNet core developer classic program and creating an open source model with collaboration, 90% of that activity is non-Cisco, really a good formula. And to help us this down is Krish Subramanian, Principal Analyst at Rishidot Research, formerly of Red Hat, formerly of a start up that was recently sold. Can't talk about it because it's not released yet. Friend of theCube, Cube alumni, part of the Clouderati, going way back. Krish, we've seen a lot of the waves of how cloud has evolved from the early days. I remember when EngineYard was a startup, Haruku was a couple guys, we were having our meetups. >> And the AWS was still like people who weren't able to make money. >> They were poo-pooing the hell out of it. It was EC2 and S3 with a couple different, I mean RightScale did everything back then, so think about the changes. And now Cisco here with the formula, they have the right formula, I got to give them props for that, doing it right. They're not trying to come in and do a land grab and sort of, "Ahh, we're Cisco", throwing their elbows around. Really doing it right, your thoughts? >> Yeah, definitely, come back to what some other legacy companies tried to do. Cisco didn't try to jump in and say, "Hey, we are going to run public cloud, compete with Amazon", and sort of take them down. They sort of waited for right moment, they initially started with the InterCloud, which will go much further, but when IoT came into picture, they were there right for that and they were there taking advantage of that. And with the increasing focus on developers, they are going right to capture the minds of developers. Especially for IoT, that is critical for Cisco to go-- >> Well, I'm really glad you're on with Peter. We have two analysts here who know the industry up and down, from every dimension. Of course, I'll add my color, but I want to ask both of you guys a couple questions. One, do you think Cisco's making the right moves by coming out and really focusing on their core competency, which is the network? They also bought AppDynamics, so that is a big purchase. So, you got apps meets infrastructure, programmable infrastructure, which means infrastructure as code. You really can't have infrastructure as code unless Cisco gets behind it, they're the leader. So, with IoT looming, this seems like a good move for Cisco. What do you think? >> Yeah, definitely, they are going in the right direction, so it's really like IoT's still in the early stages and we have to wait and see how it is going to evolve, but Cisco is very persistent. Especially I like the AppDynamics acquisition because they are clearly telling the world that we understand that applications are the future and developers need the right tools if they are to develop their apps on Cisco infrastructure. And with the emphasis on programmability, Cisco is taking right steps towards capturing developer attention and I hope with successful events like this, they will be able to get there. >> Peter, I want to go to you for a second because we just found out, in talking to Suzy, I did not know this, but in your previous life, when you ran research at META Group, folks may not know what that was, it was a big research firm at the time, you did some really similar work around the infrastructure developer. >> Yeah >> Okay, and our comment was, "What is old is now new". I got a degree in operating systems and computer science and that seems to be the model. What is this notion of an infrastructure developer? It was mentioned in the keynote today. Does that exist in this new scenario? Do you see it being viable? It seems like the messaging is tight. What is your reaction to this notion? You've done a lot of work on that. >> Well, as a way of answering the question John, and I'll play off of something you just said, when we talk about the degree with which this is relevant to Cisco, here's what I say. Everybody's always looking for what is it that's different from today, relative to yesterday? And there's a lot of things that are different. One of the most important ones is that yesterday's computing industry emphasized a priority set of models about how you do things. So, if you thought about the network, the network had a modeled structure. You sat there and you designed a network to be as relevant to as many things as possible. Same with the database. You sat there and you designed the database to be as relevant to whatever notion of applications. When we start talking about the new world, now what we're discovering is the data is going to force a reconfiguration. That's what big data is. In many respects, it's non-structured, non-modeled data, but we still want to do analytics. Same thing with the network. We want the network to evolve and emerge, have emerging characteristics that allow us to do things that we never really anticipated when we first put this stuff down. And so, the thing that an infrastructure developer, at least as we conceived it, and we were way ahead and probably wrong for that reason, but the way we conceive it is someone has to take some degree of responsibility for starting to characterize, fill that gap, characterize the services in the infrastructure that need to be made available to application developers in a way that makes coherent and consistent sense so that an application written to an infrastructure, in fact, may become a service to another application at some point in time in the future, because they make consistent assumptions about where they operate within that margin between the application and the infrastructure. >> John: Does that environment exist today, in your opinion? >> It does in certain places. It does in certain places. I think the whole notion of containers is making, in Kubernetes for example, is making some very powerful presumptions about how applications are going to interact with each other in the future. Now, we had SOA, but we also talked about Conway's law, it just never happened because the structure of the organizations that were using SOA just guaranteed you end up with monolithic, crap applications anyway. >> Explain Conway's law real quick for people who didn't-- >> Yeah, Conway's law is, it's been mentioned in theCube a couple times, basically, it's a suggestion that the structure of the application is a reflection of the structure of the organization that created it. And so, if you have a silo-based application development organization that's looking at the application for the finance group, or the marketing group, you are going to get a structured, siloed-oriented application, no matter what underlying technology you use. And that's been that way forever. >> And so, Krish, I want to get your thoughts because let's take that to the next level. So, one of the benefits of cloud was horizontally scalable model. That really kind of, to me, was the big ah-ha moment around software. And with DevOps, which is now called cloud native, which is the same thing, infrastructures code was, hey, I'm not not an infrastructure person. I just want it to be available for me and help me configure it out and programmable, as Suzy was saying. Okay, so if you take what Peter's saying about data, you've lived through the infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, SAS wars or evolution, however you want to look at it. And, now you see that kind of coalescing into SAS and infrastructure and PAS kind of folding away and kind of becoming less of a contentious conversation. But, now that same thing's happening with data, we believe. I mean I think, maybe he may disagree, but now data's now the new data layer. What's your thoughts on that? Because now, if you inject data into what was the old cloud stack, new things are really possible. >> Yeah, the thing is, data brings in a new dimensionality to what we are seeing right now. Everything from infrastructure to application, everything requires a mindset change in terms of seeing them as services. So, even if it is a physical hardware you are dealing with, you have to make it more service-like by putting an API in front of it. So, it's changing the way how we consume these services. But, data is the one that is bringing business value to customers. When you make data easily, sort of like, inter operate with the services, let's say call it, for lack of a better term, a services ocean kind of IT model you have in your enterprise. So, when you offer to bring data into it, it offers you a lot of opportunities which didn't exist in the past. It opens up new avenues in which you could manipulate data, make sense out of it and probably get more value than what you were getting in the past. >> What's interesting, if you bring micro services, if you think about Docker and Kubernetes, as you were saying, and you bring data now into the equation and the notion of microservices, you can apply all that microservices knowledge to data. That's what you were saying, from what I hear. Or concepts of-- >> Sort of like you will bring data close to take, earlier as Peter pointed out, data was in silos, representative of the organizational structure. So, by taking a more services approach and spreading the services across these siloed, PAS, siloed organization, you are bringing the entire organization into one single umbrella, sharing the data and thereby benefiting much more than what they were getting in the past. >> So John, in the opening, one of the things we talked about, and I'll repeat it here because he's probably going to see it and I'd love to hear your comments on it, is that we went to hardware-defined networking. And then we went to software-defined networking. And, Wikibon's working on a proposition and I'm sure we'll find reasons why it's not going to play out, but again, I'd like to hear your position, is what I'll call data-defined infrastructure. So, we were on theCube last week at Informatica and we heard a lot about the role that metadata's going to play in discovery of data resources and whatnot. I can imagine adding metadata when we start talking about dependencies and time and location and things that are relevant to how a network or how an infrastructure might configure itself to serve the data, becoming a feature of the programmability of the underlying infrastructure so that we end up, in five years, we do talk about data-defined infrastructure. Just as today, we're talking about software-defined infrastructure, where the infrastructure, literally, responds to the needs of the data because that, ultimately, is the most flexible way of think about this. What do you think? >> Yeah, I fully agree with you. In fact, data brings in a new dimensionality to the equation where applications, it's a morph based on what is there in the data. So, on-the-fly, the infrastructure needs to be modified. So, data sort of brings in a new way of doing infrastructure from what we have done in the past. I fully agree with the role of data in that and how, through the application, that influences how we deal with infrastructure. It does change completely. >> All right, so I got to ask you guys a question. Journeys, is journey to DevOps, journey to digital transformation, certainly has a lot of cloud, has a lot of open source involved with it. We're seeing the Ford CEO get fired, he hasn't been on the job for four years, right? So, you guys both work with end users and advise them, so what's your advise to CXOs where, hey the clock now is, I thought four years was short. It really should be seven to 10 on the transformation scale, but people are getting axed in their third year, so they got to show results. How does an executive make all this stuff happen in such a short time? Or should they just reset expectations? >> When the executive comes in, he, or she, not only should look at their core business, they should also think that they are a technology business and change the mindset completely. That mindset change needs a push from the top that's going to accelerate the change down the lane and I think the executive should think that they are becoming a CEO, or CXO, of a technology company, rather than a manufacturing company or a automobile company kind of thing. >> I think that's true, but look, we haven't studied what happened at Ford in detail because I'm sure there's some subtleties in there that we just don't fully understand, but on the surface, it sounds like he might have gotten a little bit of a raw deal, just from the pure standpoint of-- >> Well the stock was down 39%, so my guess is total Wall Street hatchet job, but -- >> Peter: Exactly. >> We don't know a lot of the politics, but Val Bercovici, who was on earlier, who has a lot of experience in organizations that net app since 97, or late 90s, brought an interesting point, you were saying earlier. Tesla creates a car that's a service. And so, to me, I hate to use the cliche, "Everything as a service", but essentially, that's what software's going to. So, where you make up a day, that's why I'm kind of poking at the data thing because I think you're on to som-- >> But it's the end of the day, Tesla still has to have a shop that bends metal, there's still some car manufacturing things that have to happen. And, in many respects, whether the old CEO is saying, well the value proposition is, someday this autonomous vehicle is going to happen, but right now, we still got to build cars that can compete in the world market. There's a lot of subtleties here. There are-- >> Yeah, but Tesla does upgrade with software over the network. >> For an 80 to $100,000 price point and there's about four billion people that are going to buy cars in the next five years that may, or may not, be able to buy a 80,000 to $100,000 car. So anyway, coming back to your core point, I think what it really means is that if you're in a situation where you don't have visibility in a how, some of these new, digital approaches are going to create value for your business, you're doomed. So, I think the first thing you got to do is you got to be very explicit. This is how digital technology's going to create value for my business, that's number one. And, be able to articulate that to, virtually, anybody that's capable of understanding it, including Wall Street. But, to do that, you have to step back and say, and what is it about that digital technology that's going to create value for my business. And the thing that's going to do it, or not, is the data. >> And the asset configuration around, the work around the assets. >> Especially the asset configuration, as it's defined by the data. And, increasingly, there's an economics terms, what we're going to see happen over the next 10 years is the asset specificities are going to go down dramatically. In other words, the ability to which, or the degree to which an asset can only be configured to a specific purpose. Software's going to change that dynamic dramatically. And that, in many respects, is one of the fundamental, underlying things that's going on here. But, at the end of the day, you have to say, what role is data going to play in my business? How am I going to articulate that role by saying that I'm going to incorporate digital in this way? And then, put in place a plan that demonstrates that you're competent about some of these things. And, if your shareholders don't like it, they're not going to like it from anybody, not just you. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the Cloud Native Compute Foundation. Why it's so successful. Why, in your opinion, do you think, there just booming with vendors, a lot of cash infusion, a lot of activity, projects went from one, three, 10. We had Dan on earlier, a lot of growth in the cloud native. And then, also, Kubernetes as a, kind of as an emerging, really interesting dynamic, vis-a-vis multicloud. So why cloud native is so popular and the impact of Kubernetes. >> Cloud native is popular because of late, developers are understanding that the role we are building applications is not going to work in cloud. When containers came into picture, that really made it easy for developers to develop cloud native apps. It got them to take advantage of the more distributed nature of the underlying infrastructure. So, the containers are the main reason why cloud native has become the household term, even in the enterprises. That could be one of the reason why Cloud Native Foundation is popular. Because they came at the right time to host all these development projects and evangelize with the developers and take steps in that. As far as Kubernetes is concerned, it worked at Google's CE. If it can work at Google's CE and then solve Google's problem, it should be able to help-- >> If it's good for Google, it's good for me. That's their strategy. >> And also, people are slowly realizing that as more and more enterprises go to cloud, they are realizing that going with a single cloud provider may not solve all their problems because different cloud providers have different set of services. So, they want to take advantage of all that. But, they want a single pane of glass to manage everything. Kubernetes is this general to be that at the cloud-- >> Krish, thanks for coming on. Peter, thanks for the comments, I'll just wrap up the analyst segment by saying, in my opinion, I think Cisco's making a good move here because, to your point about Google and Kubernetes is, and that's one of many examples of great software being contributed to open source. And open source, for all the times I've been involved with it since I was in college, is this more great software coming to the table now than ever before and that's creating great innovation. So, combined with the cloud and cloud native and Kubernetes, a perfect storm of innovation is coming. And it's coming, not from vendors, it's coming from open source. And, so the smart vendors are putting their toe in the water and really figuring it out. And again, the-- >> Peter: It is coming from vendor support though. >> Well the vendors are smart by putting their people in open source as a proxy for contribution. That's the open source model. That, to me, is the new R&D. It's a new innovation strategy, coupled with some proprietary R&D. Not saying they should be going all open source. >> I agree with it completely. In fact, I would even go one step further and say open source is completely disrupting the traditional enterprise software in modern business. Think about someone like Capital One putting critical software as open source and disrupting all the vendors in the space, so it's-- >> Well, let's continue the conversation in studio or tomorrow. Again, open source is horizontally scaling as well. Great stuff, great projects. More exclusive coverage from the inaugural event for Cisco's DevNet Create after this short break. (up-tempo music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the senior director of strategy--

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our live coverage from theCUBE exclusive, two days with Cisco's inaugural DevNet Create event. I'm John Furrier, with my co-host, Peter Burris, who's the general manager of Wikibon.com, and head of research for SiliconANGLE Media. We're talking with Susie Wee, who is the vice president and CTO of Cisco's DevNet, the creator of DevNet, the developer program that was started as grassroots, now a full-blown Cisco developer program. Now starting another foray into the cloud-native open-source community with this new event, DevNet Create. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, John. >> Thanks for having us. We love going to the inaugural events because they're always the first, and you know, being bloggers, and media, you got to be first. First news, first comments. >> Susie: Always first. >> Always first, and we're the only media here, so thank you. >> Susie: Thank you. >> So tell us about the event (Susie chuckles). You're the host and the creator, with your team. >> Susie: Yes. >> How did this come together, why DevNet Create? You have DevNet, this event is going extremely well, tell us. >> Awesome, so, yeah, so we have DevNet, we've had DevNet for about three years. It was actually exactly three years ago that we had our first DevNet Zone, a developer conference at Cisco Live, three years ago. And there, we felt like we pretty squarely hit... We've had successes there, we've had a pretty strong handle on our infrastructure audience, but what we see is that there's this huge transition, transformation going on in the industry, with IoT and cloud, that changes the definition of how applications meet infrastructure. And so this whole thing with, you know, applications, what is an application? What is the infrastructure? The infrastructure is now programmable, how can apps interact? It opens up a whole new world, and so what we did was we created DevNet Create as a standalone developer conference focused on IoT and cloud to focus on that transformation. >> And a lot of industry trends kind of going on, and moves you're making, it's the company, or you, Cisco is making, AppDynamics, big acquisition, kind of speaks to that, but also, there's always a natural progression for Cisco to have moving up the stack with software, but IoT gives you guys a unique opportunity with the network concept. So, making it network programmable, infrastructure as code, as some say in the DevOps world, is the ethos. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys see yourselves engaging with the community, and what are some of the plans, and what's some of the feedback you're getting here at the event? >> So what we've done here at the event is that, you know, as you've seen from the channel is that, our content is 90% from the community, maybe 10% from Cisco, 90% from the community, because we believe it is all about the ecosystem. It's about how applications meet the infrastructure, it's the systems people are building together. And there's a lot of movement in developing these technologies. We don't know the final form of how an IoT app... Like, who's going to build the app, who's going to build the users, who's going to run the service, who's going to run the infrastructure? It's all still evolving, and we think that the community needs to come together to solve this to make the most of the opportunity. And so that's what, really, this is all about. And then, we think it actually involves learning the languages, making sure that the app folks know the language of the infrastructure folks. They don't have to become experts in it, but just knowing the language. Understand what part's programmable, what part's not, what benefit can you derive from the infrastructure. And then, by really having knowledge of what you can get across, and creating a forum for people to get together to have this conversation, we can make those breakthroughs. >> So just a clarification, you said that 90% of the sessions are non-Cisco, or from the community, and only 10% from Cisco? >> Susie: That's right. >> Is that by design? >> That is absolutely by design. So, when we have the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live, that's all about all of Cisco's products, platforms, APIs, bringing in the community to come and learn about those, but DevNet Create was really, squarely for IoT and app developers, IoT app developers, cloud developers, people working on DevOps, to look at that intersection. So we didn't go into all the gory details of networking, like we very much like to do, but we were really trying to focus on, "What's the value to application developers, "and what are the opportunities?" >> Well, it's interesting because, Susie, we're in the midst, as you said, of a pretty significant transformation, and there's a lot of turbulence, not only in business and how business conceives of digital technology, and the role it's going to play, the developer world, cloud-this, cloud-that, different suppliers, but one of the anchor points is the network, even though the network itself is changing, >> It is. >> in the midst of a transformation, but it's a step function. So, you go from, on the wireless, go outside, 1G to 3G, to 5G, et cetera, that kind of thing, but how is the developer going to inform that next step function in the network, the next big transformation in the network, and to what degree is this kind of a session going to really catalyze that kind of a change? >> Absolutely. So, what happens is, you're right, it's something that we all know, all app developers know, and actually, every person in the world knows, the network is important. The network provides connectivity, the network is what provides Internet, data, and everything there. That's critical to apps, but the thing that's been heard about it is it's not programmable. Like, you kind of get that thing configured, it's working now, you leave it. Don't touch it. >> It's still wires. In the minds of a lot of people, (Susie laughs) it's still wires, right? >> It is, it's wires, or even if it's wireless, once you can get it configured, you leave it. You're not playing with it again, it's too, kind of, dangerous or fragile to change it. >> Because of the sensitivity to operational... >> Because of the sensitivity to operations. The big change that's happening is the network is becoming programmable. The network has APIs, and then, we have things like automation and controller-based networking coming into play, so you don't actually configure it by going one network device at a time, you feed these into a controller, and then, now you're actually doing network-wide commands. That takes out the human error, it actually makes it easy to configure and reconfigure. And when you have that ability to provision resources, to kind of reset configurations, when you can do that quickly through APIs, you suddenly have a tool that you never had before. So let me give you an example. So let's say that you're in a building, you have your badging systems, your automated elevators, you have your surveillance cameras, you want to put out a new security system with surveillance cameras. You don't want to put that on the same network segment as your vending machines. You have a different level of security required. Could put in a work order to say... >> Unless you're really worried about who's stealing from the vending machines. (all laugh) >> So what you can do, now that it's programmable, is use infrastructure as code, is basically say, "Boom, give me a new network segment, "let me drop these new devices onto it, "let the programmable network automatically create "a separate network segment that has "all of these devices together." Then you can start to use group-based policy to now set, you know, the rules that you want, for how those cameras are accessed, who they're accessible by, what kind of data can come in and out of it. You can actually do that with infrastructure as code. That was not a knob that app developers had before. So they don't need to become networking experts, but now they have these knobs that they can use to give you that next level of security, to give you that next level of programmability, and to do it at the speed that an app developer needs. >> So I was talking to Steve Post-y earlier this morning, and he's from Redhead, he's a lead developer, he's not a network guy, he's self-proclaimed, "Hey, I'm not a networking person, I care about apps," and he's a developer, and he brought up something interesting I want to get your thoughts on. I think you're onto something really big with your vision, which is why we're so pumped about it, and he brought up an example of ecosystem's edges, and margins of the edge of these, that when they come together, creates innovation opportunities. And he used the example of data science meets cloud. And what he was using in particular was the example of most data people in the old days were data jocks, they did data, they did things, and they weren't really computer scientists, but as those two communities came together, the computer scientist saying, "Hey, I don't know about data," and the data guy's like, "Hey, you know about algorithms," "I know about algorithms," so innovation happened when that came together. What you're doing here, if I got this right, is you're saying, "Hey, DevNet's doing great," from a Cisco perspective, "but now this whole new creative innovation world "in the cloud is happening in real time. "Bring 'em together, "so best of Cisco knowledge to the guys who don't want to be (chuckles) "experts in that can share information." Is that kind of where this is going? >> Yeah, that's exactly where it's going, and same example, earlier in my career, I was working on sending video over networks, and then you had the networking people doing networking, you had the video people doing video compression, but then video networking, or streaming media, kind of, oh, you can put, you know, your knowledge of the compression and the network all together, so that kind of emerged as a field. The same thing, so, so far, the applications, and the infrastructure, and IT departments have been completely separate. You would just do the best you can, it was the job of IT to provide it, but now, suddenly there's an opportunity to bring these together. And it's, again, it's because the infrastructure's becoming programmable, and now it has knobs and can work quickly. So, yes, this is kind of new ground. And things could continue the way they are, right? And it's okay, we're getting by, but you just won't be realizing the potential of the real kind of... >> Well, open-source has clearly demonstrated that the collective intelligence of communities can really move fast, and share, and it's now tier one, so you're seeing companies go public, MuleSoft, Cloudera, and the list goes on and on. So now you have the dynamic of open-source, so I got to ask you the question, as you go out with DevNet Create, as this creation, the builders that are out there building apps are going to have programmable networks, how do you see this next leg of the journey? Because you have the foray now with DevNet Create, looks good, really well done, what's next? >> What's next is going on and making the real instances that show the application and infrastructure synergy. So let me just give you a really simple example of something that we're doing, which is that Apple and Cisco have had a partnership, and this partnership is coming together in that we have iOS developers who are writing mobile apps. So you have your mobile apps people are writing, we have iOS 10, your app developers are writing these apps. But everybody knows you run into a situation where your app gets congested on the network. Let's say that we're here in Westfield Mall, and they want to put out an AR/VR app, and you want that traffic to work, right? 'Cause if the mall wants to offer an AR/VR service, it takes a lot of bandwidth to get that data through, but through this partnership, what we have is an ability we have to use an iOS 10 SDK to, basically, business optimize your app so that it can run well on a Cisco infrastructure. So basically, it's just saying, "Hey, this is important, "put it in the highest QoS (John laughs) level setting, "and make your AR/VR work." So it's just having these real instances where these work together. >> I mean, I used to be a plumber back in my day when I used to work at HP, and I know how hard it is, and so I'm going to bring this up, because networks used to be stable and fragile/brittle, and then that would determine what you could do on top of it. But there are things like DNS, we hear about DNS, we hear about configuration management, setting ports, and doing this, to your point, I want dynamic provisioning or policy at any given moment, yet the network's got to be ready to do that. >> You don't want to submit a work order for that. (laughs) >> You don't want to have to say, "Hey, can you provision port, whatever, "I need to send a bunch of bandwidth." This is what we're talking about when we say programmable infrastructure, just letting the apps interface with network APIs, right? >> Absolutely, and I think that, you heard earlier, that with CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, just announced CNI, so that what they're doing is now offering an ability to take your kind of container orchestration and take into consideration what's going on in the network, right? So if this link is more congested than that, then make sure that you're doing your orchestration in the right ways, that the network is informing the cloud layer, that the cloud platform's informing the network, so that's going to be huge. >> But do you think, I'm curious, Susie, do you think that we're going to see a time when we start bringing conventions at layer 7 in the network, so we start to parse layer 7 down a little bit, so developers can think in terms of some of those higher-level services that previously have been presentation? Are we likely to see that kind of a thing? As the pain of the network starts to go away, and an explicit knowledge of layer 1-6 become a lot less important, are we going to see a natural expansion at layer 7, and think about distributed data, distributed applications, distributed services, more coherence to how that happens on an industry-wide basis? What do you think? >> Yeah, so let's see, I don't know if I have a view on which layers go away, or which layers compress... >> But the knowledge, the focal point of those? >> But the knowledge, absolutely. So it comes into play, and what happens is, like, what is the infrastructure? In the Internet of things, things are a part of your infrastructure. That's just different. As you're going to microservices, applications aren't applications, they're being written as microservices, and then once you put those microservices in containers, they can move around. So you actually have a pretty different paradigm for thinking about the architecture of applications, of how they're orchestrated, what resources they sit on, and how you provision, so you get a very new paradigm for that. And then the key is... >> But they're inherently networked? >> That's right, that's right. It's all about connectivity, it's all about, you know, they don't do anything without the network. And we're pushing the boundaries of the network. >> These aren't function calls over memory like we used to think about things, these things are inherently networked. We know we have network SOAs, and service levels, and whatnot... >> Susie: There is. >> It sounds like we have... I was wondering, here, at this conference, are developers starting to talk about, "Geez, I would like to look at Kubernetes "as a lower-level feature in layer 7," >> Susie: They are. (laughs) >> "where there's a consistent approach to thinking about "how that orchestration layer is going to work, "and how containers work above that, "because I don't have to worry about session anymore, I don't have to worry about transmission." >> Susie: Absolutely. >> That goes away, so give me a little bit more visibility into some of that higher-level stuff, where, really, the connectivity issues are becoming more obvious. >> Absolutely, and an interesting example is that, you know, we actually talked about AppDynamics in the keynote, and so, with AppDynamics, what kind of information can you get from these bits of code that are running in different places? And it comes into where we have the Royal Bank of Scotland, who's saying, "What's my busiest bank branch "where people are doing mobile banking in the country?" And they're like, "Well, how do I answer that question?" And then you see that, oh, someone has their mobile phone, they take an app, then you actually break it down to how is that request, that API, how is that being, kind of, operated throughout your network. And when you take a look, you say, "Okay, well, this called this "piece of code that's running here. "This piece of code used this API to talk to this other service, to talk to this other," you can map that out, get back the calls of, "Hey, this is how many times this API has been called, "this is how many times this service has been called, "this is the ones that are talking to who," then they came up with the answer, saying that our busiest bank branch is the 9 a.m. Paddington Train Station. >> And that's a great example, because now you gain visibility >> Exactly >> into where the dependencies are, which even if you don't explicitly render it that way, starts to build a picture of what the layers of function might look like based on the dependencies and the sharing of the underlying services. >> That's right, and that's where you're saying, like, "What? The infrastructure just gave me business value (John laughs) "in a very direct way. "How did that happen?" >> John: That's a huge opportunity for Cisco. >> So it's a big... >> Well, let's get in the studio and let's break down the Kubernetes and the containers, 'cause Docker's here, a lot of other folks are here. We've had, also, Abby Kearns, the executive director of Cloud Foundry. We've had the executive director from the Cloud Native Compute Foundation, Dan was here, a lot of folks here in the industry kind of validating >> Yeah, Craig was here. >> your support. Sun used to have an expression, the network is the computer, but now, maybe Chuck Robbins should go for network is the app, or the app is the network, (Susie laughs) I mean, that's what's happening here. The interplay between the two is happening big time. >> It is happening here, yeah. Just every element, every piece of code, what we saw is that this year, developers will write 111 billion lines of code. You think about that, every piece of... >> Peter: That we know about. (chuckles) >> That we know about, there's probably more. (chuckles) and all of that, you're right, these are broken up into pieces that are inherently networked, right? They have data, it's all about data and information that they're sharing to give interesting experiences. So this is absolutely a new paradigm. >> Well, congratulations on your success. What a great journey, I know it's been a short time, but I noticed after our in-studio interview, when you came in to share with us, the show, as a preview, Chuck Robbins retweeted one of the tweets. >> Susie: He did. >> And so I got to ask you, internally at Cisco, I know you put this together kind of as a entrepreneurial inside the company, and had support for that, what is the conversation you have with Chuck and the executive team about this effort? Because they got to see a clear line of sight that the value of the network is creating business value. What are some of the internal conversations, can you give us a little bit of color without giving away all the trade secrets? >> Yeah, well, internally, we're getting huge support. Chuck Robbins checks in on this, he actually has been checking in saying, "How's it going?" Rowan Trollope sending, "Hey, how's it going? "I heard it's going great." >> Did he text you today? >> Chuck did a couple days ago. >> John: Okay. (chuckles) >> And then Rowan, today, so, yeah, so we have a lot of conversation. >> Rowan's a CUBE alumni, Chuck's got to get on theCUBE, (Susie laughs) Rowan's been on before. >> Yeah, so they're all kind of checking in on it. We have the IoT World Forum going on in parallel, in London, so, otherwise, they would be here as well. But they understand... >> John: There's a general excitement? This is not a rogue event? >> There's huge excitement. >> This is not, like, a rogue event? >> It's not, it's not, and what happens is... They also understand that we're talking about bringing in the ecosystem. It's not just a Cisco conversation, it is a community... >> Yeah, you're doing it right, you're not trying to take over the sandbox. You're coming in with respect and actually putting out content, and learning. >> Putting out content, and really, it's all about letting people interact and create this new area. It's breaking new ground, it's facilitating a conversation. I mean, where apps meet infrastructure, it's controversial as well. Some people should say, "They should never meet. "Why would they ever meet?" (Susie and John laugh) >> So, we do a lot of shows, I was telling Peter that, you know, we were at the first Hadoop Summit, second Hadoop World, with Cloudera, when they were a small startup, Docker's first event, CubeCon's first event, we do a lot of firsts, and I got to tell you, the energy here feels a lot like those events, where it's just so obvious that (chuckles) "Okay, finally, programmable infrastructure." >> Well, I'll be honest, I'm relieved, because, you know, we were taking a bet. So, you know, when I was bouncing this idea off of you, we were talking about it, it was a risk. So the question is, will it appeal to the app developers, will it appeal to the cloud developers, will it appeal overall? And I'm very relieved and happy to see that the vibe is very positive. >> Very positive. >> So people are very receptive to these ideas. >> Well, you know community, give more than you take has always been a great philosophy. >> I'm always a little paranoid and (John laughs) nervous but I'm very pleased, 'cause people seem to be really happy. There's a lot of action. >> There are a lot of PCs with Docker stickers on them here. (John laughs) >> There are. (laughs) There are, yes, yes. We have the true cloud, IoT, we have the hardcore developers here, and they seem to be very engaged and really embracing... >> Well, we've always been covering DevOps, again, from the beginning, and cloud-native is, to me, it's just a semantic word for DevOps. It's happening, it's going mainstream, and great to see Cisco, and congratulations on all your work, and thanks for including theCUBE in your inaugural event. >> Susie: Thank you. >> Susie Wee, Vice President and CTO at Cisco's DevNet. We're here for the inaugural event, DevNet Create, with the community, two great communities coming together. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, stay tuned for more coverage from our exclusive DevNet Create coverage, stay with us. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director of strategy.

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE, covering DevNetCreate 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in San Francisco for the inaugural event for Cisco's DevNetCreate, part of their DevNet classic developer community now extending out into the community of open source and cloud native and dev ops world, where applications and infrastructure coming together. It's the CUBE's exclusive two-days coverage. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of WikiBon.com research. Our next guess is Ben Brown, CEO of Botkit out of Austin. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> So we were just chatting before we came on about how open source and how essentially using machines and humans workin' together, that there's a nice evolving machine learning marketplace for having new kinds of re-imagined recommendation engines. Chat bots that actually work. Integrations, again, back to software. >> Ben: Yeah. >> Tell us what you guys do, and how you guys relate to the cloud native, and what your role in open source is. >> Sure. So, it's real interesting, you know. Over the last couple of decades, an enormous amount of progress has been made on AI and machine learning, and NLP tools at these big companies like Google and Microsoft, and they are now giving that away, right? Like, it is free to use Facebook's top of the line machine learning algorithm. But, it's sort of a mystery and unfamiliar territory for developers coming from web or mobile. It's a black box that nobody's ever used before. So, what we do at Botkit is provide tools for developers, mostly developers who are coming from the web or coming from mobile development, and give them semantic, easy-to-use, and customized tools for building conversational user interfaces. And that can mean chat bots, that can mean voice skills for the Amazon Echo or Cortana or things like that, and give them these open source tools that allow them to take advantage of this exciting NLP and voice to text, and text to voice, and all that to build real software today. So what Botkit is is an open source library. It's free to use, it's MIT-licensed, so very liberally licensed, and it gives the developers tools like hearing and saying, right? So it's not about API calls and NLP classification and utterances and all that. It's about how does a robot think and act, and the metaphors around that. >> So I think of Botkit, I think of Webkit, these are languages of developers. So are you guys actually providing bot kits to create bots, or is it more of a platform? How do you guys describe what you do in open source, and how do you guys stay in business and keep the lights on? (laughter) >> Good question. Yeah, so we're a venture-backed startup. We have an open source toolkit and these kits, right? So if you want to build a Slack bot or a Facebook bot, we will give you 90% of the code that you need to bring that bot up and start talking. And that piece is all free. And we do that for Slack, for Facebook, for Twilio, for Cisco, for Alexa, and Microsoft, and a bunch of other platforms. And what we're really hoping is that we can instill in people, or sort of give to people a skill set that is akin to a web master, right? There's a bunch of skills that are interrelated that you need to actually bring this software to life. >> It saves time. It's tooling to save them time and to get acclimated and get working. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And then, on top of that, we have a set of power tools that sort of complete the process. Botkit, the open source piece is a software development library, but you also need deployment management and operational tools and content management and integrations and things like that. So that's where our business is. >> The class freemium model. The first hit's free, as they say. I'm sorry, that's a drug dealer model. (laughter) You get 'em in there but, as they scale, they're already successful, so it's not like you're gouging someone for not getting value out of it. >> Absolutely. I mean, we think about our business model in the same way a lot of other developer APIs do these days. >> Well, let's talk about some of those other developer APIs, because used to be that you used a language, then you would use a data management system, and then we start talking about web services, and that's all good. But where does this end up going, where you have a specialized toolkit for bots that you can add? You made up specialized toolkits for-- Amazon's talkin' about specialized toolkits for voice recognition that you can add. So is it just going to be in the interface? Are there going to be other classes of kits that developers are going to buy, and combine them together? Where do you see this going? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like, you know, all software development that came before, right? Nobody built every line of code for their mobile app. Nobody had to define what a button was for iOS. That was done at a higher level. In the same way, people who are building these conversational apps, or composing their own code with third party services, with open source software and all that combine. So there's really interesting stuff going on. Like I said, there's NLP tools coming down from all of these big players, but also from small players. There are tools like human takeover, which is like a new thing that didn't exist before. You're talking to a bot, you're starting to get angry, IBM Watson can identify your sentiment and say, "Oh, this person is frustrated. Let's bring in "a real operator." So there's third-party services to actually manage that kind of thing. >> Male: I want that job, by the way. (laughter) >> Only angry customers. >> Parachute me in just for the angry customers, yeah. >> Does not sound like a great job, yeah. And then there are almost every kind of component that you might imagine existing in the web stack is being specialized, or the mobile stack, is being specialized for conversational stuff, 'cause it's just different enough, right? So analytics and CRM and push notifications. >> I mean, you don't got to be a rocket scientist to figure out that voice is the hottest app in the market. I mean, you got Alexa, you got Siri, Google. I mean, voice interface is here. That's conversational, to your point. >> Ben: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> So now software will evolve. So that's kind of where you guys are betting, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean-- >> John: Not just voice, but conversational software. >> Right. I mean, as I was just saying in my session here, I don't think anybody really wanted to sit down at a typewriter attached to a television. That was just a technology that we had at the time. Charles Babbage or whatever was dreaming about the thinking machine. So we're just much, much closer to that now, and we think that, over the next five or ten years, almost all software will have some sort of conversational element, whether that's in the app, does it mean you're on an Alexa skill that's embedded in the car, who knows? >> It's just never fight fashion, but this is a relevant fashion piece, where we see machine learning get rendered in AI and some of the cool applications like cars and voice and AI. So I got to ask you. You mention that all this free stuff's comin' out. It's like Christmas, it's like a kid in the candy store if you're a developer. How, in your opinion, has that shaped the developer ecosystems because, outside of the young kids who are just green and have no idea that it wasn't like this before. Back in the old days we used to actually program everything. Lot of cool stuff coming in for free from Google, from Facebook, in some cases Amazon. But I mean, what's the impact? >> I mean, people are able to take advantage of much more sophisticated technology much earlier on in the process, right? For the last 10 years, we've been talking about "Ah, machine learning, isn't it great if you're Google, "and you have ten trillion data points?" But nobody else has it, so it's not even worth talking about. But now, it's possible. You can start on day one, and start training your machine learning and models and things like that. And you don't have to actually invest in that technology. And voice to text, things like-- >> It's given them more speed to get to newer high, the higher functioning stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. And it's bringing that kind of technology that was-- Most of AI has been in academia, right, and in research. And now, all of a sudden, it's on my kitchen counter. My kid now uses NLP technology every day, and that is a big-- Without the independent developers and smaller apps-- >> Well, the IoT's going to be in your wheelhouse, too. As more things get connected, the interfaces will be more human. >> Well, I was going to ask a question about that. Does this technology-- Today, the technology's mainly thought of part of the interface between the machine and the human being. Does this technology end up in between machines? >> Yeah, absolutely, sort of between bot. Inter-bot communication is very, very interesting. And then also-- So yes, absolutely. But also, like being on the other side of the human, or like between people, right? So customer service representatives using AI to have solutions suggested to them that they can pick from and things like that, like translating systems that suggest the response, so that you can use it if you so desire. And it makes your job easier, but it's not actually doing the transaction for you. It's really, really interesting, and that's nothing that the end user would actually experience themselves. >> Final question for you. Cisco has always been the king of networks. I mean, the internet was their wave, they rode that hard. We all know what they've done. Amazing, connecting routes together, routers, MLPS routers, PLSM routers, paths. I mean, they own that. Now they're moving up the stack, so now you're seeing this a gesture of going into the community, bringing apps and infrastructure together, to bring true dev ops. Kind of like what you're doing with your interfaces to software. What's your thoughts on this strategy. So, what's your take and reaction to what Cisco's doing? >> Clearly, the software layer is becoming more and more powerful and prevalent for people, and a bigger part of people's lives. So I think it makes tons of sense. And what Cisco's going to gain by opening these things up is the innovation of the community, like they were never going to be able to do the things that people are going to do with Spark APIs. And the way that things are connected and interwoven to each other, because I have a smart home, I have all these IoT devices. They don't talk to one another. I am left to weave them together. >> Peter: You mediate. >> I mediate, right. And I'm sophisticated enough to be able to do that. But if they're going to make it as easy as plug and play, and drag and drop, it's going to open up all sorts of exciting capabilities. >> It's the quote as saying waterfall versus agile, which one's faster? Agile. >> Well, but that's exactly why I asked the question about bots reconciling, or bots you having mediating between different devices or different machines, is that it could be a way that a human being can understand a set of instructions for how these things engage other stuff, so that it still looks like it's a set of human interfaces while, at the same time, it's operating at machine speed with machine efficiency. >> This is one of the most interesting things, particularly in the IoT space, that I've seen. There's an app called Thing-tin that is like a chat room for devices, and the way it works is like those devices emit machine messages and human readable messages, but they can talk to each other in machine language, but you can read it as a dialogue. >> That's SkyNet. That's SkyNet. I'm tellin' you, it's coming. >> Yeah, if SkyNet only turns your lights on and off. >> Machines talking to each other. "Hey, go kill that human over there." (laughter) >> Somebody's going to have to program it to kill first. >> We need algorithms to watch the algorithms. Great stuff. I think Cisco clearly, this is a move that they have to make. I've been following Cisco for many generations. Past 10 years, they were one of the first in smart homes, one of the first in smart cities, first with IoT, they called it Internet of Everything, the human network, social network. They had the pulse on all the right trends, but could not execute it, Peter. And, to your point, they'll never get there without open source, in my opinion. I think this is a signal that Cisco can do that. Now here's the key: They have the keys to the kingdom. It's called the network, and I think that making that programmable and extensible is a great strategy. >> Well, that's what they have to be able to do. They have to be able to make it, they have to make it obviously available to developers so they can create value on it. And that's something that they're still struggling to do. >> Yeah, so when he does the Botkit and does all this new creative activity going on, the network has to be adaptive and not get in the way, and not for the creativity of the developer, 'cause networking is hard. >> And that's a great point. And so much of what we do at Botkit is try to drain the complexity out of this complex stuff and make it available so that this enormous amount of power is available to the developer of today. >> Power to the developer, developers are in charge, developers are driving the network policy in a dynamic way. Congratulations on your success, great to chat with you. I'm going to check out Botkit. I already have some ways, Peter and I are already lookin' at it for the clips, and then the crowd chat virtually, great stuff, congratulations. Ben Brown, CEO of Botkit. Check it out, Botkit-dot-AI. We are soon to be replaced by bots here in the CUBE (laughter) with talking machines, but that's down the way, when SkyNet takes over. This is the CUBE here at the inaugural event for Cisco DevNetCreate. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be back after this short break. (electronic music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior--

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for CUBE's special coverage, exclusive coverage, of Cisco Systems DevNet Create. It's an inaugural event for DevNet, a new extension to their developer program. DevNet, which is their classic developer program for the Cisco ecosystem, network guys, so on and so forth, moving packets around, hardware guys. DevNet Create is about developers and dev ops and cloud-native, all the goodness of application developers. Where apps meets infrastructure, certainly with the Cisco acquisition of AppDynamics, a new world order is coming down the pipe. Cisco's moving up the stack. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris is my co-host, our next guest is Val Bercovici, CUBE alumni and also guest analyst in our studio in Palo Alto, also the cofounder of Peritus.ai, and now you can talk about it. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. We get to talk about it, finally. >> So before we get into your company, and I want to drill into it because the first public CUBE interview, drilling down on what you're working on. What's your take on Cisco's event here, because, I've known Cisco since I moved to Silicon Valley, 18 years, and even before then, and they scaled all the internet connecting networks. There's always been a discussion internally inside Cisco about moving up the stack. And it's always been kind of like a Civil War. Half the company wants to move up the stack, half doesn't, and now, you've been in NetApp, you know this world and its infrastructure, its hardware, its gear, its boxes, network packets. This is a seminal moment for Cisco. They've tried some open source before, but this seems like an all-in bet. Your thoughts? >> It is, and I was just telling Yodi Rahm, before we went live on stage that I think this is like Goldilocks event, right? It's my first. Apparently, it's the first one of its kind here at Cisco, and for me it's not too big. It's not too small. I find it really just the right size, and I find it very well-targeted, in terms of the fellow speakers, panelists that I was on with today in terms of, I see the right amount of laptops, the right amount of code, basically, amongst the attendees on the floor here. So my first impression, 'cause that's all I have so far, is it's a very well-targeted show, and it's not unique anymore. You'll notice Intel kind of pulled back from having one large event, one large annual event, and smaller more targeted events for developers, for operators, for other ISVs, and so forth. >> You're talking about the IDF Intel Developer Forum. >> The IDF, yeah, it's no longer a big, monolithic event. They split it up into more- >> And IBM has also collapsed their shows into one monster show. So little micro-events seem to be the norm. >> Yeah, I wouldn't even call it quite even a micro-event. It's a bit bigger than that, but it's not a VMworld . >> It's not a Dreamforce. >> It's not a COMDEX to VR sales. >> Interesting, I like they did their homework on the panels. So in terms of subject matter, the agenda looks great, but I do agree with you. I like how principals are here. It's not just staff here. It's both people in the trenches at Cisco, and the execs are here. Susie Wee and some other folks, they run Cisco a lot. They're all here. >> And their CTO, this morning, I caught the opening keynote livestream on the way over here. She did a fantastic job describing the role of the infrastructure developer, which is something that is a bit nebulous to nail down, at least it has been in the past, and I'm really glad that Cisco is echoing that, because I think it helps their entire ecosystem, their partner ecosystem, particularly former employers like NetApp of mine. >> I'm usually critical of big companies trying to put their toe in the water with some event that looks like a little cloud washing or you know, here or there, but I think Cisco's got a legit opportunity with programmable infrastructure. And I think, just in general, straight up, they do, because their infrastructure, and Peter and I talked about that. But I think IoT is really the big driver. They could really, that's a network connection. It's at the edge. It requires intelligence. That's a good angle for them. >> It's a great angle. The only beef I have, the gripe I have, is they still call it IoE, I think. If it's going to be Internet of Everything, and it's Internet of nothing, right? I really wish they'd kind of stick to the agreed term, and what they are doing of course is giving- >> But they were first with IoE. They were, you got to give Cisco, when they ran those commercials, what 10 years ago? >> Yeah. >> You know. >> It's a personal in for me. The commercials are fantastic. It's just the term bothers me. >> They got dogma with IoE, come on, get rid of it. Okay, tell me about your company? >> So Peritus.ai, we've realized now there's a chance to go beyond traditional digital disruption of existing industries to cognitive disruption. Let me explain what I mean by that. We're seeing a lot of increasing pace of change in data centers. The conference here, and all the technologies spoken about here, are very foreign to more traditional data center operators, and so the new environments, microservice architectures, or cloud-native apps or so forth. It's a pace of change that we haven't seen before. Agile business and agile software developer models can push code out realistically on a daily basis, whereas the waterfall model and the iCode models in most IT service practitioners practice, that's a manual or quarterly update cycle, with formal change managed practices. >> John: A more settled, structured. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Slow. >> Familiar. >> John: Reliable. >> You know, but it's the past, and the pace of change now is creating stress within IT organizations and stress within the product support organizations of the vendors that they choose to deploy. You couple that with increasing complexity of the environments we have here. We have a lot going on, the ethos of CNCF, which is container packaged, dynamically orchestrated, and micro services architected apps, cloud-native apps. The abstraction layers are masking a lot of complexity there, but the complexity is still there. And you have very good availability if you're able to write to cloud-native principles as a developer, but nevertheless, you still got that .001% of your outages so forth. And the last line of defense towards business continuity is still a human. You still got escalation engineers and support organizations that go through pretty contrived and complicated workflows to triage and diagnose problems, perhaps a case manager to assign a case or subject manager expert, get that back and forth information with the customer and finally resolve the case, and this is what we term cognitive disruption. The maturity of the AI platforms now have reached a point where you can take these complicated workflows that require nuance and inference, and actually apply true machine learning and deep learning to them. And if not entirely automate the resolution of these complex cases, better prepare a scarce resource, an escalation engineer with lots of experience, with more context up front when they encounter the case, so they can close it more quickly, and this has- >> So you're targeting, so if I understand this correctly, you're targeting the personnel in the data center. >> Val: The supportability space. >> Escalation engineers, the human labor, the last mile, if you will, or whatever, first mile, how you look at it. >> Correct. We see APM vendors in this space, we see ITSM vendors in the space. They're partners and even platforms for us. No one really is focused on supportability and automating those workflows using cognitive techniques. >> John: Give an example, give an example. >> The best example I can give actually is firsthand. I'll try and be as generic as I can to protect the innocent, but if you take a look- >> John: NetApp. >> (laughs) It's not even specifically a NetApp case. >> John: Okay, all right. >> If you look at the supply chain upstream, let's talk about electronic supply chain. If a particular manufacturer defect occurs upstream, that defect gets shipped in bundles, purchased by an equipment supplier vendor in bundles, and deployed by customers in bundles. So it's not like one of these one node outage situations is the best case scenario, traditional triple replication, you know. >> John: It's a bad batch basically. >> A bad batch. >> A lot of bad product. >> That can take out not just a node, it can take out a rack. It can take out multiple racks of storage gear, switching gear, server hosts, and so forth. In that case, again, your last line of defense is a human. You basically got to triage and diagnose the problem, could be hardware problem, could be a driver-software problem, could be an upstream OS or database problem. And it's a very stressful environment, a very stressful situation. You can take a look at prior case notes. You can take a look at machine logs and data. You can take a look at product documentation and bill of materials from suppliers, and you can pre-analyze a lot of that, and factor that into your diagnosis, effectively having it almost ready before the case is even opened, so that when the escalation engineer is assigned the case, they don't start from ground zero. They start from third base and almost they're rounding their way to home, and they're able to apply all the prior knowledge, algorithms never sleep. All the prior knowledge in terms of all the cases that have actually been dealt with that match that to a degree. They're never perfect matches, because that's just business process automation. There's a degree of inference required, and using AI techniques, we're able to guess that you know what? I've seen this before. It's very obscure, but it's actually going to be this resolution. >> So AI's technology that you're using in machine learning and data, what problem are you solving specifically? Saving them time, getting them faster resolutions? >> So we're improving the efficiency of support operations. There's always margin pressures within customer support operations. We're fundamentally solving complex system problems. We've reached a point now where business process automation can solve trivial support cases. >> John: Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on. Expert system's supposed to do this. >> And they did in the past, and now we're evolving beyond the expert. >> Not really. Remember those expert system stays? >> Yeah, I remember LISP and all those early days, so yeah. >> So this kind of sounds like a modern version of an expert system to aid the support engineers to either have a predetermined understanding of options and time to solution. >> So we're able to do so much more than that, right? We're able to create what we call otologies. We're able to categorize all the cases that you've seen in the past, find out whether this new one fits an existing category, if so, if it matches other criteria, if not, defining a category. We're able to orchestrate. Resolution is not just a one-shot deal. Resolution is diagnose the problem, find out if you have some subject matter experts available to resolve the issue, assign it to them, track their progress, close the case, follow up on customer satisfaction. All those things are pretty elaborate workflows that can be highly automated today with cognitive approach-- >> Congratulations on launching. Thanks for spending the time to lay that out. What's next? You've got some seed funding? >> Val: We've got some seed funding. >> You got some in an incubator at the Hive in Palo Alto, which we know quite well. Rob is great, Rob is a great friend. He's done great, he's done great. How many people do have, what are you guys looking to do? What are some of the priorities? >> We are hiring. We're definitely looking to get more data scientists on staff, more full-stack engineers particularly with log experience. We're still looking for a CTO and leadership team. So there's a lot of hiring coming in place. >> John: How many in there now? >> We have about, less than 10 people working right now. >> It's a great opportunity for a classic early-stage opportunity. >> Yeah, early stage opportunity. We're addressing a hot space, and what I love is I personally shifted from being a provider of cloud-native solutions in this market to being a consumer. So I'm seeing exactly how a perfect storm is coming together of machine and deep learning algorithms, running on, orchestrated-- >> John: Both sides of the table. You should talk to Mark Sister. >> Yeah. He's been on both sides. What's it like to be on the other side now? >> It's everything I actually thought it would be, because at the end of the day, I always say, developers are the ultimate pragmatists. So it's not so much about brand loyalty at any particular vendors. What solution, whether it's an open source library, whether it's a commercial library, whether it's a propietary cloud service or something in between. What solution can solve my task, this next task? And composite applications are a very real thing right now. >> So we had a question I posted into the crowd chat, from this social net. I'm going to ask you the same questions. So Burt's watching and maybe you'll find that thread, and I'll add to it later. Here's the question. What challenges still remain as part of implementing DevOps, in your opinion? How did you see the landscape, and how are people addressing them? In your expert opinion, what's the answer to that question? What's your opinion? >> It's a two-faceted answer, at least. The first one, it's not a cliche. It's still a cultural challenge. If you want to actually want to map, it's not even a cultural challenge specifically, it's Conway's Law. Any product output, software output, is a function of your organizational structure that created it. So I find that whether you want to call it culture, whether you want to call it org structure, the org structure's rarely in place to incentivize entire teams to collaborate together throughout a full CICD pipeline process. You've still got incentive structures and org structures in place for people to develop code, unit test it, perhaps even integration test it, but I see more often than I'd like to, isolated or fenced off operations teams that take that and try to make it something real. They might call themselves SREs, and outside recovery engineers, but they're not integrated enough into the development process, in my mind. >> So you're saying the organization structures are also foreclosing their ability be agile, even though they're trying hard, that the incentives are too grounded in there. >> So I still see a lot of skunkworks projects as DevOps projects, and it shouldn't be that way anymore, right? There should be, where there's a legitimate business reason for more agile businesses, there should be a much more formal DevOps structure, as opposed to skunkworks DevOps structure. So that's one challenge, and it's not new, but it's also not resolved. And the other one really is this blind spot for the autonomous data center vision, this blind spot for operations being 100% automated and really just never having to deal with the problem. The blind spot is everything breaks. New technology just happens to break in new ways, but it does fundamentally break, and if your last line of defense is a human or a group of humans, you can expect a very, very different sort of responsiveness and agility as opposed to having something automated. >> Peter and I have been talking all morning the Ford firing of Mark Fields, which was announced yesterday. He quote retired by the Twitter handle of Ford, which is just code words for he got pushed aside. One, we're big fans of Mark Fields, before we covered Ford there in Palo Alto, doing some innovative centers over there, and also a Cloud Foundry customer. So I was actually, took notice of that. We were commenting on not so much the tech, but the guy got fired in less than three years into his journey as chief executive. >> Val: Yeah. >> Now the stock's down 39% so the hammer's coming down from either the family, Ford family, or Wall Street, Peter thinks Wall Street. But this brings up the question, how are you going to be a transformational leader, if you don't have the runway? Back to your org structure. This is, this is-- >> I'm like a broken record. I was thinking that yesterday as I was watching CNBC, and just thinking in my mind, processing what they were announcing. I'm realizing in my head, I bet why, because I don't know, but I bet why, I speculate why he got fired, because he wasn't able to put the org structure and incentives in place to run faster, and that's what the board asked his successor is run faster, and if his successor doesn't put the org structure and the incentives in place to be an agile business. That's the definition of insanity. It's banging your head against the wall. >> If I had to add one more thing to that comment, which by the way I agree with you. If you could configure an asset in a company besides the organizational structure, so you did that, what would your next asset be? More cloud, more data-centric, what would be? >> It might be cliche, but it's totally true, I would have a cloud-first approach to everything. So we don't remember this guy called Obama anymore, but really he did a pretty revolutionary thing, when he brought in a CIO eight, nine years ago, and he made every federal government department defend a capital purchase. And they basically have to go through a multi-hundred page document to defend a capital IT acquisition, but to actually go cloud first or cloud native, didn't require almost any pre-approval at all to get funding. >> So we made it easier incentives to go cloud. >> Created incentives, and I'm a big believer that cloud is not a panacea. >> That helped Amazon, not IBM, as the CIA case now. >> I'm a big believer in life cycles, so it's not like cloud is the rubber stamp solution for every problem, but the beginning innovation phase of every new product line or revenue stream really should be in the cloud right now. The amazing services, forget about IS and all that. Look at the machine language and APIs, IoT APIs, the entire CICD pipelines that are automated and simplistic, the innovation phase for everyone should be in the crowd. Then you got to take a step back, look at that bill, get over your sticker shock, and figure out whether you can afford to stay in a cloud using maybe some of those higher-level proprietary high-margin services and whether you want to re-factor. And that's where professional services kick in, and I think that might be the next great disruption for AI, is re-factoring apps. >> I think one of the things, final question I want to get your thoughts on. Pretend that we're at Cisco and we go back to the ranch, and someone says, "Hey, what's that DevNet Create?" What's our advice to our peers, if we had an opinion that people valued inside Cisco, doubled down on DevNet Create, continue, merge it DevNet? What would your advice be? >> I'm a long time James Governor fan. Developers are the new kingmakers. Actually I think we're in this situation that's not very well understood by business leaders right now, where developers are influencing all the technology infrastructure decisions we're making, but they don't necessarily write the checks. But if you want to run an agile business, a digital business today, you can't do it without happy developers and a good developer experience, so you have to cater to their needs and their biases and so forth, and at shows like this I think, bring Cisco's large ecosystem to bear, where we can figure out how Cisco can maximize the developer experience, how partners, and I'm soon to be a Cisco partner myself at Peritus.ai can maximize their developer experience and just drive more modern business. >> Bring the developer community in with the networking, get those margins connected. Val Bercovici, cofounder of Peritus.ai, this is theCUBE with exclusive coverage of the inaugural event of Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris, returning after this short break. (electric music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior director.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2017, brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco's new inaugural event called DevNet Create, an extension, an augmentation, a community-focused event of their DevNet community, which is a Cisco developer community, now out in the wild. Our next guest is Steven Pousty, lead developer and evangelist at Red Hat, I'm John Furrier, and my co-host Peter Burris. Steven, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you very much. It's exciting to be here. >> Great to have you on. We were just talking before on camera, getting all animated like, "Hey, turn the cameras on. "We got to get this conversation." We're talking about open source and really looking at some of the trends, but more importantly, the impact. >> Steven: Right. >> Also, we've had you guys on many times on theCUBE. We covered Red Hat Summit, Jim Whitehurst. So, abstractions layers in software, open source ecosystems, you have a background in nature. >> Steven: Yeah. I- >> And ecosystems, literally. >> Steven: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, actually I have my PhD in ecology. I'm actually a conservation biologist by training, but IT and computer programming pays the bills a lot better than-- >> Hey, anthropologists and ecologists do very well in the tech world, believe it or not. >> Steven: Yeah, I love big data. >> Peter: And philosophers. >> Yeah, and philosophers. Yeah, with all that logic and the ontologies and all that. >> Ontologies and symbiotics. >> Steven: Yep, yep. >> John: Okay, so I got to ask you, obviously Red Hat has been really the poster child for open source companies going public. We've heard since over the past generation, "The Red Hat of blank, The Red Hat of," and that got played. Certainly we downplayed that. People were trying to call Cloudera the Red Hat of Hadoop (mumbles) realizing that that's never going to happen. You were a once in a generational company, but Red Hat was a tier two company back in those days. Now, open source is certainly tier one software across the board, and I think this event at Cisco kind of amplifies that. Look at it, open source has gone a whole nother generation. A lot of young kids coming in. It's tier one software. The business model is open source. Four new companies just went public recently. So, done deal. >> Right, I mean, I think if you look in the technology ecosystem as a whole, if you don't start with open source you either have some incredibly magic sauce that no one else has or you're done. You couldn't even look at the movies... The arch enemy when I was growing up in software was Microsoft of open source, right? If you look at them now with Satya, they've made great strides to be part of the open source ecosystem at a real level, not like just lip service like they used to do sometimes. Like when I interact with some of our Microsoft partners, you can tell that there's a different change and they really believe in that open source-- >> Microsoft used to be known as lip service and vaporware and they used to kind of freeze the market with their monopoly power as some would say, but more recently they've... Back in the old days, Linux was a cancer. Steve Ballmer said, "Linux is the cancer to the industry." >> Steven: And so-- >> John: Now they're doing Linux with .NET. >> And so at the Red Hat Summit just recently I did the Microsoft keynote, I was the Red Hat person on the Microsoft keynote, and we demonstrated .NET Core running in OpenShift on Linux machines, we demonstrated SQL Server running in containers on OpenShift, and then for the end we showed some of the community work, because both of us are involved in Kubernetes. We actually showed a Windows container spinning up IIS being orchestrated from a Linux OpenShift. So, it was actually the Linux server, the Linux OpenShift server, was talking to Windows containers and spinning up Windows containers on the fly. So, I never thought that would've happened. So, it's definitely a sea change. >> And boy was that partly the sea change, we can encapsulate it, is that we used to think in terms of winners and losers in the tech industry, and now it's big winners and less big winners, but the question is how is, I think the realization Microsoft had, is that open source does not demarcate winners from losers. It demarcates, or rather suggests, a new way of thinking about how software gets developed, how software gets integrated and packaged, and ultimately how software gets diffused. So, talk a little bit about this notion of the new world of winners and winners and how this thing moves together, almost in an ecosystem type of way, so that the capabilities overall improve over time, because that's really where we're going is digital business being able to do more for customers. >> Right, and I think that's one of the things that you're seeing coming out from the open source world now is it's becoming less and less about I have this technology versus this is the technology, this open source technology, that we use to help solve your business problems. I gave a talk about this a couple times. There's a concept in ecology called, now I'm blocking on the word, but you probably came across it in school, probably even elementary school. It's the idea that you have bare earth, and then a few plants show up and they start breaking it up, and those plants create a condition where new trees come in, and then it just keeps going and going and going, and then you finally have a rainforest at the end, right? >> Peter: Diversity? >> No, it's-- >> Anyway, we don't want to put you out. >> Yeah, I'm stuck on the word and I can't remember-- >> Here's an ecology question. I saw a Facebook thing where in Yellowstone National Park they introduced four wolves to the ecosystem, and all of a sudden the rivers are no longer wide, they're tighter, there's pools. So four wolves create dynamics. So there's a coexistence, but there's still wolves. >> Right, and so the-- >> John: Who's the wolves in the industry? >> See, that's the thing, it's not that. Just because there are wolves in the industry doesn't mean that they control the entire ecosystem. So I think what I say at the end of this talk is there is no right or wrong about where you are in the ecosystem or in your evolution as an ecosystem, right? There is what is right for your business problem. So, we have this in our, especially in the United States, we have this idea of you're either the winner in this space, you're the cloud solution and you're the winner, or you're not, you're nothing. It's like the Talladega Nights, "If you're not first, you're last!" >> He runs around in his underwear. That's your outcome if you have that strategy. >> Great strategy. >> It was such a good movie. But so the point that I was trying to make in this talk is there's lots of different... So like with bird species, when they need to share a tree, there can be six different species all in the same tree, and what they do is what's called niche differentiation. That means, "Oh, I'm going to specialize "in the tops of the trees "and I'm going to only eat this type of caterpillar." And the one on the bottom says, "I specialize on beetles and I do this." And I think what you're seeing with the open source stuff is all these things can coexist. Like GNOME versus KDE. Everybody was claiming GNOME or KDE was the winner for forever. They're still around for forever. So, what I think with this cloud software as well where everybody is like, "Oh, this is the one winning," or this is the, there's a whole host of places for them all to live, and with open source I think things just live forever. >> John: What's your ecosystem analogy that coexistence is actually a better philosophy looking at the big picture than some dominant wolf or whatever. >> That's right, it's the diversity, it's the mutualism, it's the coevolution, it's the right diversity. Like a desert is actually a beautiful place if you go to it. Like we like to pick on the desert, but if you actually spend time in the desert it's gorgeous. There's nothing wrong with the desert. So, if you're some company who doesn't need Kubernetes and all the other pieces in this huge cloud environment, don't feel like that's something you have to take on. >> Peter: But they are the desert. >> That's right, but they are the desert. But, all my PhD research was in the desert, and I used to hate it, because I started this little rolly polly in the desert, and by the time I left I was like, "Oh, I miss the desert when I don't have it." >> John: The sunrises are beautiful. >> Sunrises are beautiful. You can see forever. If you actually pay attention to the small things... All I'm trying to point out is people live in Kansas, people live in New York, people live all over, and they usually find where they live, unless it's some disgusting dump, they say this is a beautiful-- >> Peter: They find beauty in it. >> Yeah, and I think it shouldn't necessarily be everybody has to get to the same place and use all the same technology. There's technology reasons for everything. >> So, I want to pick up on that concept. So the industry used to be pretty much structured around asset specificity. This asset does this for you. As we move more to a software orientation that notion of asset specificity starts to blend away. I think that's one of the seminal features of digital business and digital business transformation is the reduction of asset specificity, but it does mean that increasingly we need to focus on what I'll call value specificity, that we're moving away from the asset being the dominant determinant of structure and how you do things to the value that's being generated and the value that's being presented in any number of different fashions, and that becomes what dictates or describes who you are, what you do, both as an individual, also as a company, as well as a piece of software data. So talk a bit about kind of this notion of niche specialization being more tied to the value that you create as opposed to the asset that you bring. >> That's right, and we're seeing this a lot with our customers, who... You know, OpenShift is based off of Kubernetes and Docker and all that stuff, and containers, and so what we're seeing is a lot of companies come to us and say, "Well, I want to use OpenShift for this. "I want to use OpenShift for that." It's no more that we go to customers and say, "Here's OpenShift and you will use it "for purposes X, Y, and Z." What it is is well, that IT group might say well I've got three different business groups that I have to produce stuff for them that they can use. And they'll say, "Can I use Kubernetes for this? "Can I use, oh, I can't? "Well, then I'll get something else for this, or can we adapt-- >> Or complement it. >> Yeah, it's about creating value for the business unit, and it's becoming more and more that now. I think it's an evolution that we've seen, again, this evolution of stuff with the shadow IT and all that stuff. It became less about you're some sort of specialized high priest with this special asset that only you know how to control, I know how to do GIS software, I know how to do big data, no, what value do you produce for me? I don't care that you can buy these kinds of servers and provision them. If I can't use them, what does that do for me, right? So I think we see that at Red Hat a lot where we were the enterprise Linux company, and I think our leaders have done a really good job of saying, "Yeah, that's a good place "where the puck is right now, "but that's not where the puck is staying. "It's moving towards value, "it's moving towards integrated solutions." Go ahead. >> Let me extend this a little bit. So one of the things that we've observed within (mumbles) SiliconAngle, and we've talked to some other people today specifically about this, was the idea that open source has done a really good job of looking at a thing, a convention, that's well defined and well established and then building an open source variant of it. Open source has not been as successful, for example, in the big data world, where the use case or the definition of where we're going is amorphous. Instead, a lot of open source development ends up looking at each other saying, "Well, I'll fix your problem and you'll fix my problem, kind of. Nothing wrong with that, but the vision of where the industry is going to go. How are different companies, what will be open source leadership at redefining where this industry goes so that the open source developers can both be free to do what they need to do, create value as they need to, but at the same time, share a common understanding of where this ends up? >> So I think this goes back to what you were talking about with value, right? So I think what ends up... I'll use the example of big data. So I did a lot of statistical analysis for my PhD, and back then you used SAS or S-PLUS, both proprietary solutions. I think what has caused some of the explosion in big data is that you had these data scientists, the statisticians, intermingling, fertilizing with the computer science people who were handling these other really big problems. So what comes out of that, this is that margin thing again, right? You have statistics and-- >> Peter: Diversity and interesting things happen in the margin. >> At the margin. So what you have is these two groups come together, and suddenly you have the computer science people saying, "Oh, well I know a lot about algorithms "and I'm going to help you figure out "how to get value of what... "You're trying to solve this statistical algorithm, "I'm going to help you build distributed software that does that and that's where we get that happening. >> So the collaboration at the edge, the fringe, the lunatic fringe, or whatever you want to call it, the margin, is where the innovation is. >> I think that's where the innovation is because that helps avoid the navel gazing, right? Like, "Oh, I'm looking at what you exactly built, "and I'm going to build a slight variation on it." Well no, I actually need some, when you bring other disciplines in they say, "Well, this is the problem I'm going to solve," and the computer science person or the other side will say, "Well, that sounds "kind of like this thing, but let's try," and then suddenly new ideas come up and new ways to handle things. So I think, again, switching to value rather than what technology am I going to build is what's going to actually drive like, we need something to handle our big data. That's what's going to drive the vision. So you see in the big data world you see Spark, you see Zeppelin, you see all these different things competing, but what they're all doing is trying to drive how do I analyze big data efficiently? So you get some competing solutions. Then over time I think that's the vision that they're driving. >> I got to ask you, so like naval gazers is one dimension, but also there's the rearranging the deck chairs, like someone says, "Let's move things around "and magic will happen." Well you're pushing a whole nother concept, which I think is legit, which is as you put people together it might be uncomfortable, but then innovation can come out of it. Okay, so here's the ways. Computer and science and cloud computing, all that great stuff is happening, compute, storage, algorithm, etc., data, now society. So now society has issues, because what's the societal impact? These are first generation problems that we're facing, which side of the street does the cards drive on? Who gets hit first? They have to make these decisions. You see all these new issues, from even younger kids, cyber bullying, online behavior, across the board, societal impact. We are those margins. >> So I think for me tools... I thought about this a lot, right, because in the college I was kind of a tools person, and I think tools are value neutral. Any tool can be used for good or for bad. So, what we're doing right now in the open source world is develop, and in IT in general, is developing new tools, and what usually ends up happening is society develops norms after the tools have been created. In some ways, I think... I some ways, I kind of... It's a hard one. This is a much longer discussion and probably would involve some sort of alcoholic liquid or something to draw it out. >> It's a double edged sword, or tool, depending on how you look at it. We got to see it first before you can problem solve it. >> But the problem is-- >> You can't problem solve vapor. >> That's right, but on the other hand, sometimes you can see if you stopped and aren't so enamored with the latest and greatest tool without thinking about like, "Oh, well what are actually the implications of it?" I was going to say, I think the Europeans do a little bit of a better job of putting a little bit of foresight into tools when they come out saying, "Hold on, let's take a look at this." >> John: At the impact? >> Yeah, at the impact. >> So let me add one more thing to the conversation, because I think you're spot on, that the tools may be value neutral, but the impact, the transaction cost, of doing certain types of work in a different ways, and some work, and work is not necessarily value neutral. We may look at some tools and say, "That work is not good. "This tool reduces the transaction cost "of performing that work faster "or more completely than that work, "so that tool is going to have a less positive impact--" >> Impact on society as a whole >> "Than some other tool." And I think we can start introducing that kind of an analysis into it. >> I think so. I think that was... I live in this area, like I'm in Santa Cruz, so when I want to I say I'm not in the Valley, but when I want to I say I am in the Valley, I think the Valley is particularly enamored with the toys, or the tools, that it produces, and how technology will solve all our problems, and technology is great, and it is inherently good, and I like to say, "No, it's a tool, "and so a tool could be used for good or for bad." Like one example is ride sharing. Everybody was like, "Oh, this is the best! "This is awesome!" One of the things I thought of, my father is an immigrant, so I'm first generation on my father's side, and he wasn't a taxi driver, but I know how hard it is for first generation immigrants if you don't speak the language really well. So what used to happen with those ride shares is you had to have the capital to acquire a car before you could actually do ride sharing. So what you were basically doing was disenfranchising people who didn't have the capital from actually having this as a source of income when they came to the country. So, I was very conflicted about it to start with. Now, I'm less conflicted. I actually don't think ride share, given the economics I've seen actually play out I actually think ride sharing is not as big of a market and as game changing as everybody was making it. It was just some funny economics. >> Well Steven, certainly the conversation is very awesome. We should have you at the studio in Palo Alto next time you're in the Valley. >> Sounds great. >> You have plenty of tools and shiny new toys. >> Go by the Baylands and then go birding together at the Baylands, or maybe some fishing. >> Let's bring theCube over to Santa Cruz for a couple days. >> We should go down. >> That's great. >> Chill in Santa Cruz. Surf those waves, cloud, data, society. >> There you go. >> theCube on the boardwalk. >> Final question for you. Cisco is trying to push the margin with this event. It's a new event. It's an extension. It's outside their comfort zone. They had some projects that were kind of dismissed, interclouding, other things, this is a statement. Your thoughts on this show, because they have DevNet, why DevNet Create? Your thoughts. >> I think DevNet Create is a great opportunity for Cisco. I've been to the Cisco, is it Cisco Live, the huge gazillion people event? And there's a lot of energy around that, but that's mostly like network engineers and people who were bread and butter Cisco people. I really like that Cisco, that blurring between software and hardware means that Cisco really should be pushing people more in the, "We're going to help you create really interesting solutions." The more they make that easy for the developers... I think some developers are hardware hackers and love it. I am not one of those, and there's a lot of us who are not, and the more you make it easy for me to use software to create really interesting hardware things, the better it is for us. >> It's a classic case, the data scientists meets the algorithm guy. >> Steven: Exactly. >> So they're trying to bring these margins together where it might be awkward at first, but magic can happen. >> If I got to sit with some hardware people and like, "You need to make it so that I can write in Python "and do a whole bunch of neat networking and stuff "so at my house I can keep track "of how many birds are coming to my bird feeder "because I want to do this really cool experiment, "make that easy for me." >> By the way, you got camera, so you got bird recognition software. >> Steven: Exactly, exactly. >> A new feature on AWS. >> Yeah, I've seen demos of that. It's incredible what they can actually pull out now. >> Steven Pousty, Lead Developer at Red Hat, thanks for coming on theCube. Great conversation. >> Thank you very much. >> We'll have to continue it in Palo Alto. More live coverage here at Cisco Systems' DevNet Create. It's their inaugural event for developers. It's where IoT and app developers meet infrastructure, application infrastructure (mumbles). I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris with theCube. We'll be right back. Stay with us. (techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco DevNet.

[Electronic Music] >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. Hello everyone. Welcome to this special presentation of theCUBE here in San Francisco, live for two days of wall-to-wall coverage for Cisco Systems inaugural developer event, called DevNet Create. The hashtag is #DevNetCreate. This is a new opportunity for Cisco, a new event. Again, inaugural event. Peter, I'd love to go through all the first-time events, because you never know if it's going to be the last event. Inaugural event, but really Cisco has a very successful DevNet developer program, all Cisco. This is a new effort to go out and talk to cloud developers in the DevOps community. This is SiliconANGLE's two days of coverage of Cisco's foray into the DevOps world. Really bringing app dynamics and all their great stuff above top of the stack together. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. The next two days, live coverage. Peter, big story here is that Cisco is moving up the stack, because they are the leader in networking. They have been for years. We've been joking on theCUBE for many months now, plumbers are turning into machinists. Machinists are being automated away by machines. The value of the network for infrastructure and code becomes super paramount now that automation is starting to happen at the application layer, where data is being used for value purposes to create new experiences for users. I think this is an important story. Here, for Cisco Systems as they move out of the network guys, plumbers, network box guys, who have been incumbent data center presence, as well as powering the biggest, and basically the internet. This is a big story. What is your analysis? What's your take? What's your view of Cisco's DevNet Create opportunity? >> Well, I think there's three things we should be looking for over the next couple of days, John. The first one is the very, very big strategic picture is that the world wants to better understand how to program the internet. Now, if you think about it from a computer science standpoint, the internet is still a computer. And we're still trying to find those ways where we can apply any process, any data, any time, any person, anywhere. Now, there are some physical limitations of being able to do that, but the basic model for how we're going to do internet scale computing still isn't obvious. It still isn't clear. In many respects, the cloud is an approximate to that, and we'll get there, and Cisco's going to have a major role to play. On a tactical level, one of the reasons why Cisco has been so successful and remains so successful in the networking space is because of this enormous body of experts that are still using the Cisco Command Line Interface to set up routers, to do configuration of the network, to do an enormous amount of work down in the lower levels inside the pipes. Now, that group also has to be modernized along with the technology. And Cisco wants to bring those people along. And having them become full members in this whole DevOps transition is going to be really crucial, not only to them and their businesses, but also Cisco. And I think you mentioned the third one. On a very practical, reality level, Cisco needs to bring AppDynamics out to a position of, I don't want to say primacy, but certainly importance within the overall Cisco ecosystem. And so this show is going to be one of the ways to make progress on that. >> And Peter, I got to say, the research that you're doing at wikibon.com, for the folks watching, go to wikibon.com. Peter's been leading the research team there and really has some amazing research. Key stakes in the grounds of the two big waves that are happening: cloud computing, aka DevOps and other things, and the role of data, data science, whatever you want to call it. Data in cloud. Peter, the wave that's hitting, it's musical chairs. And the music stops and you're a big player like Cisco, and you don't have a play in cloud or data, you're screwed. And so it's clear to me that with the AppDynamics acquisition of Cisco, again, a foray into establishing the relationship between applications and code of the network really gives them a unique opportunity to add a lot of value and have a big seat at the table of those next two waves. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, John. In fact, the research we're doing is very very compelling and starts to point to the idea that we used to have hardware as infrastructure, now we're doing, or hardware-defined infrastructure, and now everyone's in this grip of software-defined infrastructure, which is really important and will be here for quite some time. But as you start thinking about the real asset that's going to dictate how digital business works, how businesses get reconfigured, how they re-institutionalize the work that they need to do, and how infrastructure ultimately gets deployed, in many respects, it's time to start thinking in terms of data-defined infrastructure. And it's a term that we're starting to play with inside Wikibon to see how far that actually goes. But I think it's got a lot of prescriptive potency to it. That the idea is, increasingly, your digital business is going to be function of where your data is, what you can do with it, how fast, all those other things. And this notion of data as the asset that ultimately guides and shapes the characteristics of what customers want and what businesses can do is going to be come increasingly important. And this conference and the people here are absolutely part of that change. >> The reason why I like this event and why I'm here and why we're doing this small little event is that I think this is a tell sign, a canary in the coal mine of what's coming on this big wave. And I'll give you an example. I watched Cisco dominate the internet generation because they connected the networks together. They moved and created great value in connecting offices and then ultimately, inner networking, the rest is history. We are now in the next seminal moment of internet scale going cloud and data. So to me, there are two main storylines that I'm watching and I want to get your reaction to on this. One is customer-facing digital transformation. Every customer is trying to figure out how to transform, and Cisco is no- >> Peter: Every business. >> Every business is trying to figure out or Cisco's customers or potential customers have to transform and be a better business. Look no further than the Ford CEO being fired after less than five years on the job. How the hell can you transform a company in four years? You can't. Pressure, stocks down from 39%, he's ousted by Wall Street. Now, this is the pressure of the real world. Two, the notion of cloud computing and machine learning and AI, the application-specific goodness of DevOps infrastructure and code is bringing up the issue of automation. Jobs going away. So, two major threads: growth, with digital transformation or Cisco's customers. And two, the fear that what will cloud do for my job? It's the number one question asked in our crowd chats, in our conversations on theCUBE is, hey look, there's a fire going on around us. Machines are going to take over our jobs. There's going to be a further gap between the haves and have-nots. As Sarbjeet Johal just mentioned on Twitter, as I tweeted to Jas I think, but it's come up on all the crowd chats. Jobs going away as an impact, personally I think they're going to shift but that's my opinion. Your reaction. Digital transformation and automation, machine learning, these things automating away jobs. >> Well, let's start with the second one because in many respects, it's the practical test of what happens with that first question about digital transformation. First off, I agree with you. I think we'll see tasks go away and jobs reconfigure. And a better way of thinking about this is businesses have historically institutionalized the work that they perform around the assets that they regard as most important. In a very practical sense within IT, you can track the history of IT by watching how CIOs and businesses configure the work of people within IT around the assets that the businesses regard as most valuable. When a mainframe costs 50 or 70 million dollars, not surprisingly, that's what you configure around. As you move into the client-server domain, it became the PCs and the applications. >> John: And the data center. >> And the data center. Now we're moving to datas and assets and work will get re-institutionalized that as well. But data has some very specific and interesting characteristics as an asset that maybe we'll get into. But I think what it really points up is not that we're going to see people suddenly being thrown out of work. If you got knowledge and you can apply that knowledge and you can work with other people, the world is going to continue to find a place for you to make money and to add some value. So, that's not to say that this notion of being thrown out of work isn't important, is not going to have a major implication. But more likely, what we're going to see is data as an asset is going to force a rethinking of how we institutionalize work, which is going to force a rethinking of what tasks do and do not create value and what we can automate, and that's going to give people an opportunity to learn or not, and if they don't learn, yeah, maybe you are out on your own. >> We're old enough with our gray hairs to say that we've seen some waves before, and I broke into the business with a computer science degree in the late 80s. So I was on the back end of that punch card and mainframe generation. I watched people clutch on to the mainframe and the jobs just did go, they went away. And there were a few people who did maintenance and they kept their jobs and it become a political football, and people got laid off, but they got shifted. They got shifted. They got shifted to the minicomputer and then the data center. So, the same exact thing's happening and this is why I like this show. Because Cisco has to move from those plumbers, the networking guys, the guys who were the A-1 resource. Networks were the kingpins of the enterprise. They ran the show. They ran the networks. Tier 1 personnel now being commoditized. And my advice to my friends in the networking business, and this is why the show exists, you got to shift your shills to the next value proposition. That's data. By the way, it's still the internet, so I think they're going to be in good shape. If you're a networking guy, you got to go to the next network effect. That's not necessarily boxes. It's still packets. It's still policy. It's still good work. >> It's still security. So let's think about what you just said, John. That you move from a world where I perform the tasks on a particular set of Cisco boxes, to I am responsible for insuring that distributed data works. That's not subtle. I mean, it's major transformation but we are going to have an enormous need for people that can handle and deal with distributed data. I'm going to come back to something you said earlier. And that was the minicomputer revolution. You know, I've been around for a long time too. I came in just before you. What killed the minicomputer was not the microprocessor. People could easily put microprocessors into minicomputers. What killed the minicomputer was that digital had their own proprietary network. IBM had SNA down at the System/36 AS 100, et cetera. You had Prime and DG. Everybody had their own propriety network to handle what they did from a business standpoint, from a business value standpoint within the businesses. What killed the minicomputer world was TCP/IP and this company, Cisco. >> John: Yep. >> Now the question is, >> John: 3Com was involved in that so let's not-- >> What's that? 3Com was involved. >> Peter: Oh, 3Com, absolutely. >> 3Com and Cisco, the internetworking class. >> But it was this company in particular that said, "We're going to flatten all those networks, put them into TCP/IP. Here's the routers." 3Com and Banyon and a whole bunch of others were very important. Coming back to this show at this moment right now, we also see on the horizon a focus on cloud and not data. A focus on your supplier and their wants and needs and not data is going to lead to a world where intercloud connectivity and computing is going to be a major challenge. >> John: That's ironic. Intercloud is ironic because I talked to Lou Tucker 3 years ago, OpenStack Cisco CTO, and internetworking, parallel to interclouding. Now, Cisco-- >> Peter: It's even worse. It's more complex. >> Cisco canceled the interclouding initiative but if you look at where this is going, to that point, it's semantics. Multicloud is the hottest trend right now because hybrid IT, hybrid cloud is the gateway to true multicloud. And I think you're doing a lot of research on that. But let's talk about that. With TCP/IP did for internetworking, you could argue that data and cloud does for multicloud. >> Well I would say that somebody, the data becomes the determinant. The data becomes the most interesting thing to worry about. And then the question is, who's going to do that? Are Amazon and Microsoft and Google going to get together and say here's a set of cloud standards that will ensure that you have seamless end-to-end computing? Maybe? Probably not. Will OpenStack emerge out of RedHat as kind of the universal, well, it's not happening. Will Oracle be successful at saying, "Oh no, forget all that stuff. Bring it all inside oracle."? Probably not. >> John: Here's a question. Go ahead. >> This notion of end-to-end is going to be really crucial to a business, really crucial to architects, and really crucial to development. And how you handle that end-to-end is something that has to start emerging. The answers to those questions have to start emerging out of conferences like this. >> And Cisco certainly has to make this move now. Otherwise, they'll be driftwood if they don't get out >> Peter: That's right. in front of that next wave and ride this wave. But here's what's interesting. They call this the IOT Cloud Developer Conference, where application meets infrastructure. Kind of clever wording but very specific in the wording. And I want to unpack that and get your reaction. AppDynamics coalescing with Cisco's network knowledge, Okay? Because some people are like, "Oh, networking guys, how could they be DevOps guys? They're just configuring networks. They're not relevant." Here's the issue. IOT is a network issue. So you do a lot of IOT research. So, IOT, I would still classify as in that network pool of talent and domain expertise. Now, AppDynamics, which Cisco had acquired, brings the application stack to the table. So, you got the collision between AppDynamics and classic Cisco DNA into a melting pot. (laughs) This is a huge opportunity. And I wanted to get your reaction. How important is IOT, and how important is the AppDynamics component for this new vision of Cisco? >> IOT is essential. AppDynamics, they have to make it important, and that's on Cisco to make it important quite frankly. And again, that's one of the things that the show has to do. But you know it's interesting, John, as you mention that, let's unpack it even a little bit further. You said it's a networking issue and you're right. Network's clearly part of the component. I mentioned earlier, it's a distributed data issue, where the networks is a major impact on that. We might even say it's a distributed application issue. The point is, we are still in the midst of creating the language that we're going to use to describe how to approach and solve these problems. That hasn't been done yet. I mean, people say, oh yeah. Let's talk about blockchain and security. Or let's talk data gravity, or all these other concepts we're throwing around out there. We need more precision. We need more conventional agreement, consensus. There's a lot of work that this industry has to do to really address the challenges that Cisco and the people at this conference face as they try, not only to ensure their relevance looking forward, but very importantly, to solve these extremely complex problems of how we're going to dramatically expand the distribution of function and the distribution of data while at the same time increase things like near real-time. I like to say for example, John. I like to say that the edge is not a place. The edge is a time. That at the end of the day, what's most important is can you process something in the time envelope required and the place is just a way of measuring that. These are all major challenges that Wikibon research is focused on, but also folks at this conference are going to have to address if we're going to solve that next generation of business opportunities. >> That's Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE media and also general manager of Wikibon.com. Check out the research. A lot of great stuff going on. Digital transformation. The valuation of data and certainly cloud computing and the infrastructure and the impact for customers. Check it out at wikibon.com. I'm John Furrier and we're about to kick off two days of wall-to-wall coverage with Cisco as they put their foot in the water in the cloud DevOps developer community for IOT and applications. It's where applications meets infrastructure. Infrastructure is code. We'll be right back more coverage. Stay with us for two days at Cisco DevNet Create. [Electronic Music]

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE! Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. (tech music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in San Francisco, for theCUBE's exclusive two-day coverage of Cisco system's new inaugural event called DevNet Create. An extension and an augmentation of DevNet. Their classic Cisco Developer Program. Again, augmenting and creating some intelligence that's AI augmented intelligence. I'm John Furrier. Peter Burris bringing a lot of intelligence here. With Craig McLuckie who's the founder and CEO of Heptio. Cube alumni. Been on many times. Guru in the cloud. Great the see you Craig. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks so much for having me back on. >> Thanks for coming in. More importantly about this event is really the community extension for Cisco. Cisco ingratiating into the community of open source and developers in a big way. But not like brute force. It's a very humble event. Small event in San Francisco. Really you see the connection of app dynamics with the networking. And again, developers want DevOps. They want infrastructure as code. They want the scale of the internet. That's the purpose, your thoughts on this event? >> Yeah, so far I've been very impressed. It feels like a pretty authentic developer orientated event. The sessions so far have been quite accessible. And generally pretty well thought through. I think Cisco is doing a very great job of actually doing exactly what you're saying. Which is creating an event that's relevant to the developer that isn't necessarily tied to Cisco's interest. And establishing themselves in terms of thought leadership and actually creating a narrative that works with the community. >> Yea. One of the thoughts that we're talking about in conversations that we're seeing on the Cube. Especially this year. Is really the two waves that are clearly emerging in the digital transformation is cloud and data. And cloud being, you know, public cloud. Private cloud, hybrid. Essentially large scale resource data creating value. And the application developers really taking advantage of that. And you can't look further than containers and Kubernetes. As a key thread to bridging these two worlds of pretty much unlimited capacity in terms of compute. Obviously pricing. Business models and operational models are different by vendor. But the emergence of multi cloud points to, to me. The future. I personally don't think it's ready for primetime. But certainly I would say directionally correct. But hybrid clouds is a reality. So developers are going to have on prim and off prim. But how do they connect it all? How do you orchestrate it all? This is a core channel and I know your working on a FDO. And it's near and dear to your heart. You thought of the state of the industry with respect that Kubernetes, containers. And how app developers can get that freedom without being a networking guru. Really truly getting infrastructures code without a lot of, well I got to run this with that. I just want seamless cross connection between applications. >> Yeah, I think we're definately... You know a couple of things are true. One is, it's been spectacular to see the amount of progress we've made in this community in the past three years. Going from a situation where we're just seeing the spark of awareness around containers. As a frameworks packaging deploy applications. You know, into an environment to become rarely something that most every organization out there is looking at. To solve both difficult longstanding challenges in the active space. But also to open up this wall of multi cloud. To create opportunities for people to move their compute around. In this increasingly androgynous world. And its been interesting, you know, last year. To see a growing awareness of the importance of multi cloud. I think there's two things that have been really motivating that from my side. You know, one is being and understanding that it really isn't a one horse race anymore. We're really starting to see a surge in effort from both Microsoft and Google. And that's generating a lot of relevance for folks who want to run in this multi cloud world. And the second thing we start to see is a legitimate interest in this edge computing phenomenon. As organizations are aware of the implications of increasing volumes of data showing up in their networks. Showing up on premises. Showing up in these environments. Having the flexibility to move compute into those. Cause as you can see it's huge. And so obviously I'm a little bit bias. I think Kubernetes and containers are an amazing platform. I rarely, you know, tap into both of these growing sort of four points awareness. One is being able to create a natural compute fabric that decouples your applications and services from the cloud provider. That allows you to look at the cloud provider as both an infrastructure offering. But also to judiciously pull through services that are special that you might need. But then also having the flexibility to offer up your own services and then move that around from environment to environment. It's been quite wonderful the watch that start to take shape. >> Craig you've also got some good insight into architecture. You actually know the cloud game. You worked at Google. And Google's got some great stuff. Got Tensorflow coming out. You're seeing kind of that going on. And I would agree with you. It's not a one horse race anymore. Absolutely. However there's a lot of pressure on the businesses. The customer impact to deploy in this digital transformation. Is, pressure cooker's hotter than ever. >> Absolutely. >> I mean Ford just fired its CEO. Stocks down 39%. He's two years into his transformation. How the hell does a CXO transform their business if they've got a gun to their head? What's your advice for the guys out there that don't want to be the next Mark Field's? Who have to essentially run as fast as they can without disrupting operations and also try to perform top line revenue. Which is isn't easy apps. I mean it's a tough spot. Your thoughts? >> No, it is really interesting. You know, I tend to think about IT as this kind of rarely interesting optimization problem. The thing you try to maximize is velocity. You have to be able to use technology to solve core organizational problems. You have to be able to point technology to business. You have to be able to move from this world. Where technology was being delivered in a traditional products fashion. To the world where technology is being delivered as a service. If you look at Tesla. Tesla's no longer a car that is just a standard car. It's actually almost a service. Like the technology that's being deployed into the Tesla evolves day to day. The car's becoming better and richer and more amazing. And so CIO's have to start looking at this as an optimization problem. Where you want to optimize for velocity. You have to maintain an effective posture around risk management. And then, inside that you want to achieve an acceptable SLA. This is the really interesting thing is that a lot of folks are looking for like four nines, five nines, six nines, whatever crazy availability you're looking at. Except that the higher you're pushing your availability. The further back you have to pull on your velocity. And so for me, the most exciting thing. In terms of... I have these conversations with CIO's that are looking to make transform into this new world. It's helping them understand this balance between code velocity and availability, reliability. The underlying systems. Understand the role that some of these modern automated orchestration systems are playing. As a way to drive up your ability to move far. So without necessarily driving down your general service availability. And then, looking at ways to transform the organization itself. From being a technology organization that is throwing tech over the fence. To a much more nimble sort of smaller teams that are delivering up technology as a sort of services. It's an amazing time to be a part of this transformation. >> So we think... You've done a lot of research on this. Let's see if I can find your statements in there and just get a sense of how you think about these things. Is that at the end of the day. A business institutionalizer's work around the assets that are core to its mission. And John and I were talking about this before hand. In the old days, the biggest asset, most important asset. Was the hardware. So you institutionalize the work around the hardware. And then it became your application portfolio. Whether it was SCP or something else. And you institutionalize work around that. Today, our observation. Here's the test. Is that the asset that's most important is your data. And you're going to reinstitutionalize work around the data. And how you use that data and imply that data to a lot of different business activities. What do you think about that? Is data becoming that kind of central asset around which IT and hopefully even the digital business gets reinstitutionalized along the lines of what you're saying? >> Yes, absolutely. I think it's really important to understand that. There's really two components to this. You know, IT is information technology. It is literally just the process of making sense of data and information. >> Right. >> And presenting it in a way that you can make effective business decisions. >> So we're going back to our roots in many respects. >> Right. >> DP, data processing. (laughing) >> But it's also... It's also about experience. >> It's what? >> It's also about creating an experience. >> Right. >> For the customers. So I think at the heart of it this IT transformation is around two things. It's allowing modern businesses to generate a better understanding of the customer. Though the leverage use of data. >> Based on customer created data. >> Based on customer created data and observable information about the customers. And then it's based on experience. It's using that the create in crafts a richer, more satisfying better experience for the underlying customer. And obviously data is central to both of those. But the experiential side of it has a lot more than. You can't look at that purely as a data processing thing. There's a sort of mechanism that you need to do to create those wonderful experiences. And you can start leaning into things like artificial intelligence as a way to drive and prove experiences. You can lean into U Form Factors and sort of new ways to connect customers with their businesses. As a way to try that experience. And you know, the products themselves are becoming increasingly evolved. Like, I've certainly seen recently and talking to auto manufacturers. Is owning awareness that the car itself has to be creating a ongoing and sort of richer and more interesting experience. It has to be more interestingly tied to the customer. >> So software and data are connecting? >> So software and data are coming together. And software's allowing businesses to gain insight. And then you know, the data is allowing the software to create a more relevant experiences. You can't really separate those two things. >> Well software is data. At the end of the day software is data. (laughing) You go back to Yobach Deterian, that's what he said many years ago. But bring us back to Heptio for a second. So if you take a look at Kubernetes. And we agree Kubernetes. You know, in the last three months the Cube's had what, fifty thousand shows or something like that. (laughing) And we got a lot of very, very bright guests on it. >> Feels like it. >> And we've had... And Kubernetes has been a consistent theme. Containers are important. These technologies from managing and orchestrating these containers is going to be especially important. And Kubernetes is right in the mix. But Kubernetes kind of looks like an infrastructure almost a... I don't want to say a nerd. But you know what I mean? It's just not.. Heptio is taking it.. Is how you use that a little bit better. And what should you do with some of these concepts of design? Which is the one thing you didn't mention when you started talking about this stuff. How does design? Experience plus design come into play here? Especially through a tool set like Heptio? >> Oh, it's interesting. You know, at the end of the day I think there's two components to the design. There's designing for the users. You know, honestly I want Kubernetes to be the most boring thing in the world. At the end of the day I want a business to not think about their infrastructure. Like it just needs to fade into the background and become this invisible substrate around which they live. >> Yeah-- >> The water in which they swim. >> I've said for years that the value of infrastructures immensely inversely proportional to the reach to which anybody know anything about it. >> Yes. Absolutely and so. For me, you know, my interest in Kubernetes. I don't want to necessarily show up and fade into the full brain of the developers who are using the technology. I want to fend in the background. I want them to be focused on the design activities that are helping them do their work and sort of succeed and create great outcomes. And so if I had one complaint about Kubernetes right now. It's too interesting. >> Too interesting? >> It's too interesting. We need to make it... >> Boring. >> Boring. (laughing) >> We need to like... >> Ubiquitous. Well no, I think a lot of people are working on it. Cause I think they've identified it as an opportunity to connect things and make it easier. So there's work being done. People are funding companies. >> Absolutely. >> So exciting is a relative term. >> So no, there's a lot of work to be done. >> What's the biggest challenges technically Kubernetes has? If it's going to be boring, what has to happen to make it boring? >> So it's interesting. You know, I think there's a number of things that need to be done. You know, one of which is that. When we were building Kubernetes we created this configuration sintex. Which is sort of Yaumul. It's effectively a simple seralisation of the underlying Kubernetes API's. And for new users of the system. The first thing they encounters is what we call the wall of Yaumul. Where all the Yaumul's ahead. Like it's a very daunting experience. And so we're thinking hard about ways to change that. So you create a much ore elegant experience. Have much better tooling. Have the experience of editing that sort of fade into the background of the developers functions. And then, to your earlier point about design. You know, making it really easy to use some additional concepts that other people have put forward. Creating higher degrees of usability and discoverabililty for other pieces. Through projects like what Microsoft's been doing with the Helm project is really important as well. So you can expect to see us make a significant down payment on trying to... You know Heptio make a significant down payment on trying to address the problem. >> Well, I'm certainly going to be following you. We got a lot of the Lennox Foundation. The CNCF's got out there. Final question for you is. Thoughts on multi cloud? What's your definition of multi cloud? What does it mean? We kind of commented earlier because certainly there's not a winner take all cloud game. There's going to be multiple cloud players. There might be even specialty clouds. As things get boring in that abstractional layer gets simplified with developer friendly interfaces. Clouds will emerge as resource pools. But what I multi cloud mean for you? What's the customer... How should they look at what multi cloud is and what is the path to multi cloud? >> Right. So you know, multi cloud. It's starts with nutragenetity. It starts with the ability to run your workloads in a variety of environments. So nutragenetity, first of all, surrounds the physical infrastructure provider. Not being tied into a single provider model. No one necessarily wants to move back to the wall of IBM circuit 1985. Where you're locked into a single provider and hopefully nobody gets fired for buying that provider. But the problem with it is it rarely softens the amount of intervention in a sea around that. You have these single points of intervention. The second thing that I think about is nutragenetity in terms of locality. The ability to create something that runs both at the network edge. It will perform for the computing sort of realm as Cisco has coined the term. In a data center location that is a potential customer. Sort of in one of their localities. Or in a public cloud. It's going to be about multi-regional support. Being able to pull an application that you can run in the US geography and then in other regions that have regulated requirements around data mobility. So we have to handle all of those things. And inside that, I think there's kind of three key attributes of evolving sophistication that people need to think about. The first is the cloud is just solving an infrastructure outsourcing problem. And that's the most sort of simplistic way of looking at it. Second thing about cloud is. It's a way to consume a broad array of interesting technologies as a service. Right. So, it could be a simple BM but it could also be a database or something else. It's moving the wall from this situation where that thing that you can see as a service is being provisioned by a ticket. Where there's an operator at the end of it. To a world where it's being provisioned by an API. And the final piece of it is being able to move your own infrastructure to that services realm. Your own technologies. The things that are running your business. And deliver them as a service into your own wall. And so for me, multi cloud means hitting that level of nutragenetity and then being able to provision arbitrary services at the end of the API. And then deliver your own sort of services in the same fabric. >> Craig McLuckie, founder and CEO of Heptio. Former Google Cloud leader. Certainly subject matter expert. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you again. >> Thank you for your time. >> I appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. Cube alumni. Always laying down the epic knowledge here inside the Cube. Bringing you the inaugural coverage of Cisco's DevNetCreate. Developer conference as they go out into the open source community. With the full force of Cisco. Of course the Cube's here. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (tech music) >> Hi I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy & Planning for Cisco DevNet.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're live in San Francisco for Cisco System's Inaugural DevNet Create Event. Which is an extension of their DevNet Developer Program. Which is the Cisco, you know, core developer program. Now, going out to the community to create, kind of, ingratiate into the DevOps developer world, connecting IOT and infrastructure together. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage for two days. Our next guest is Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco. Welcome to The Cube, I'm John Furrier. My co-host Peter Burris, welcome to The Cube. >> Thanks. >> Tell us about your group first. Just explain your division, what you guys do and why is it relevant to DevNet Create? I mean, you guys already got a massive developer program that's kicked off and growth within Cisco. Why DevNet Create? Why ingratiate out into the community and connect with these new developers? >> Sure, sure yeah. The Meraki business, it's cloud-managed infrastructure. We make wireless, switching, routing. And now phones and cameras and mobile device management. You know what we've realized is as simple to manage, simple to monitor, that our solution is, a lot of our customers, they want to do more. They want to expand and build custom applications. They want to leverage social logins. And do all kinds of different analytics on top of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is starting to be a part of a greater technology you know, digitization of their business, or their school, or their government. And really I think the lesson that we've learned over the last couple years is the key is to open up the platform. Is to have some faith in the community. Open up the platform and do your best to recruit, you know, best in class development teams from around the world. And once people can get more from your platform than others than they're going to flock to you over time. We're lucky, right, as a cloud managed solution, we've got all of our devices already being managed and monitored from the cloud. So for developers, it's very easy to develop on cloud APIs. >> So, they don't need to come in and be a total network guru. They just come in and leverage infrastructure as code for a gameable infrastructure, is that right? >> Exactly, yeah, rest APIs in the cloud. Just like you might integrate to a Facebook API or a Google API. You integrate to a Meraki API. And you're able to control the infrastructure, get analytics from the infrastructure, understand your locations better, all of that stuff. >> Peter and I always talk on The Cube about a couple concepts, but two are relevant. For this one, I'll give you a reaction to. One is internet scale now is going to a whole nother dimension. Cisco dominating with scale at the router level within internet one. But now, with internet and things, he brings up this concept of this known technology but unknown processing development. You mentioned new devices connecting. This is, like, a new connection point that needs to be managed dynamically. You don't know when they're going to come on and off. So, that's kind of cool. I'm going to get your reaction to that. Is that how you guys see the world? Because that really is IOT. New devices are connected to the network, they need a connection, they need power, and they need to be provisioned, managed, and allocated. They're throwing off data. This is a developer dream but also could be a nightmare. >> Yeah, look, I think that a lot of the story of networking has been this concept of, like, building a network, configuring it up just right, and then when it's perfect, you don't touch it. You're afraid you might break something. The concept of fat-fingering is so common, right? And so these networks are incredibly powerful but brittle. And that just can't be the way anymore. It has to be simple enough that people can feel that their network is nimble and changeable and can be configured and managed and changed over time to react to this stuff. I think the technology is getting better when it comes to simple and automated provisioning of IOT devices. We're tracking very carefully a technology called mud that allows for these devices to provision with a policy set by the manufacturer, and all that stuff. The real story is the networks were deploying today will have to be nimble. And they'll have to be upgradable from the cloud and be able to get better over time and make it easier and easier for people who have maybe a thousand users on their network today, they're going to have a hundred thousand devices on their network in five years. And they have to be ready for that. And be ready to continue to evolve over time. >> So, one of the things, that our researchers, we've talked to a lot of CIOs, is that they're moving to an orientation that's focused on elasticity, which might be no workload at any scale to what we're calling, plasticity. Which has very, very specific meaning, at least, in the physics sense. Not only are you able to scale up and down, but you're also able to reconfigure very, very rapidly. So, things will plop into a new shape that will sustain itself. And I want to know what you think about this concept. Not just elasticity, but plasticity. The ability for the infrastructure to reconfigure itself in ways that make sense and sustain that shape as the business evolves. >> Yeah, I think, look on the compute side, that's very real, right? When you think about load on different servers, with applications running across different clouds and data centers. This stuff has to be expandable and also, expandable in a controlled way, not just, you know, spinning up thousands and thousands of servers. And I think this concept of plasticity gets to that. It has to scale but in a controlled concept. When it comes to the infrastructure, the bigger deal is, the infrastructure is always optimizing whatever networking resources you have. There's only so much ban with coming to your site or to and from you cloud and all that stuff. And when the load starts to spike, and really explode over time, before you have the ability to find more ban with another service provider. What the infrastructure has to do is it has to automatically optimize your most important apps, you more important applications. Prioritize that through your network and optimize the rest to do its best in whatever limited resource it has. Infrastructure and network infrastructure, I think of this more of like resource optimization. And those algorithms having to be nimble. And to be honest, really dynamic, as the load spikes in different ways, over different times. >> I think it's a great point. But let me push you on this. But don't we also have to remember the patterns associated with that? So we can anticipate the infrastructure, can anticipate some of these spikes, time of month, time of day. In response to particular other business events. So, the infrastructure itself has to then, have a muscle memory associated with some of these things. So, that it can, again, kind of, constantly reconfigured itself to support what the business events that are becoming more obvious overall. So that we don't have to reconfigure them ourselves. Does that make sense to you? >> Yeah, I think, you know, we talk about this, sort of, next generation of network intelligence. And really using some type of machine learning to predict these type of events. To me, it's not just about, you know, automatically reconfiguring the infrastructure. But it's also about making the next recommendation about hey, the way your trends are going, you're really going to need, x, y, z change in the physical network in two months, in six months, in nine months. Predicting what will be the next shoe to drop and how IT managers will have to expand their network capacity in what ways. You know, I think that's really this concept of networking intelligence. It's a serious problem. I mean, the machine learning to understand these patterns and to be able to see through a lot of noise and really see what's happening is interesting. I think what app dynamics does for the application space, in, like, large day centers, understanding which code is being used more often and where your load really is happening. We're going to start to see some of those same, like, deep learning data analytics applications in networking. And I think it's exciting, I agree. It's an exciting space. >> Todd, I want to get your thoughts on something because we're before we came on camera about your background at MIT and Meroki, when it's got a start on the roots. You guys were hackers, okay? You were freedom fighters for the internet band. Which, by the way, we still have broadband starvation in this country, in my opinion. But I got to give you guys props for that. So, you got kind of a hacker mentality. But you talk about your journey, about how you group is, kind of, bringing in some group core IP. You're also, kind of, a global system integrator within Cisco, among the core IP. That's more important now than ever, as app dynamics collides with the Cisco infrastructure DNA. Can you share some insight on what it's like internally as Cisco? Because this is the classic, you know, decade and a half long argument within Cisco of moving up the stack. I mean, I've talked to many SBPs at Cisco, "We got to move up the stack." And, "No, we're good down here." You guys are moving up the stack, you're on of the hackers in there. I mean, technically, maybe not a hacker now. But I mean, mentality wise, you're looking at it differently. What's the different view? Share some color. >> It's been awhile since checked in any code. Yeah, look, I'd say there's a really great reality to inquire by Cisco. If you're in networking. And we focus a lot on adding value up the stack, putting things into the cloud platform, not just into the device and all that stuff. But if you're at Cisco, Cisco is holding on the richest infrastructure, IT infrastructure, intellectual property portfolio in the world. Almost indisputably, right? And as soon as you're acquired by Cisco, you get access to this immediately. We have, through different acquisitions, been able to leverage like, source fire amp and directory of modules, networking components from around Cisco. You know, since part of Cisco, we've been able to build stackable switching and aggregation, fiber switching, all this stuff. Deep, deep networking IP from all around Cisco. And like, I keep waiting for the bill to arrive. And it never has. >> It's your like Picasso, you got this canvass, you got freedom. >> There is a lot of teamwork there. You really have access to all of the intellectual properties. As a network hacker, it's a pretty amazing opportunity. So, we're excited about that. >> But the other thing it does is that you not only get access to all of this intellectual property, but you've got an install base that is so extremely relevant and is the basis for much of what the computing industry and computing world does now and for some extended time into the future. So, you've got a ready-made target of people ready to adopt. How do you think that your core professionals, on the networking side, are going to evolve their skills and their capabilities to make themselves increasingly relevant in this emerging world. >> You know, look, I think that's the story of definite. We see a lot of IT shops that have, you know, really deep infrastructure management capability. And as the infrastructure gets more automated or they start to use Meraki and it gets simpler to manage, they find themselves with time to finally focus on their own mission. Their mission is not, like, massive management of thousands of networking devices. CIOs care about education technology, or hotel technology, or restaurant technology. They finally have time to really work on digitizing the hotel industry, or digitizing schools in Latin America, whatever that happens to be. I really see them, like, moving up the stack. The skills of IT groups around the world are what really are moving up the stack. And all of a sudden, they're building apps. And they're, like, analyzing data and trying to apply machine intelligence to customer behavior. And everything that the promise of this technology used to be. First, we got to get out of the weeds. We got to simplify the infrastructure and get our IT shops out of that and into that business-relevant IT. >> It's also a mindset shift too. Again, you mentioned earlier, it used to be the network is fixed and brittle. And then you were constrained by what the network could provide you above. Now, the apps are dictating down to the networks. So, there's now a new model of app saying, "Hey, I don't need you to be "a provisioning configuration management guru, "on provisioning new devices. "I just want to get the network to do "what I need and not be an expert." That's ethos of DevOps. How is that playing forth for you guys, with DevNet Create out here? Give us some examples of how you guys are making that a reality and some of the directional things that you were working on. >> Yeah, it's a great example. You know, we have an awesome deployment in Mexico, called Mexico Conectado. And it's kind of near and dear to my heart. Federal buildings all over Mexico. The government funded, for the first time ever, internet access and all those sites with wi-fi for the building but also publicly accessible. And a lot of the sites they deployed, it was the first internet connection going into that building. Or maybe even for that town in rural Mexico. You know, deploying out at thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of sites all around Mexico. That could've easily been it. Just trying to make that work. Just the crushing complexity of that many devices and that many sites and a dozen different service providers managing it. By using Meraki, those guys were able to, you know, deploy it out, and really have it managed by the service providers but monitored by the government. And then, open up the APIs. So, that the government can actually analyze across all of those deployments. How the network is being used, what kind of utility they're getting in urban areas verus rural areas. Is this initiative really working that they're bringing, internet's really being used in locations it hasn't been before. Or are they just, kind of, subsidizing internet for well-connected cities already? And they're really getting to see that visibility and understand if they're really meeting their goals. Not just scrambling all day to get off the ground. >> Okay, question from the crowd. Thanks for sending in the questions. Go to crowdchat.net/devnetcreate. A question is, "What is the most important "DevOps practice to you?" And you can globalize for Cisco or in your view, just the industry, community. "Infrastructure is code, configuration management, "continuous delivery, automated testing, or other?" >> Todd: Or other? >> Other being fill in the blank. One that you might think. >> Automated testing is near and dear to my heart. (John chuckles) It's near and dear to my heart. If we didn't implement a strong, automated testing practice at Meraki, we wouldn't ship anything. (John chuckling) Well, if you think about infrastructure is code, obviously that's important to us because that's what we're building, kind of, is a programmable network using these cloud APIs. Maybe the one that I feel is missing from the list would be the real concept of new product instruction through an MVP process. And this concept of building the minimally viable product. So that you get it in the hands of users as early as possible and start getting real feedback. But one value proposition, one used case met, if you can find a way to get that into the hand of users or in the hands of paying customers and start to get that feedback, that's the day that you hire the first real product manager. No one knows what people really want than active users trying to get value out of your product. And trying to figure out and get that expert in on day one before you start development. Don't believe experts, you know, believe users. >> Todd, thanks for coming on The Cube. And sharing the inside, really appreciate. Final question for you. DevNet's been very successful at the Susie. And the team put that together. It's pumping on all cylinders. Just go live, big showcase there. DevNet created an augural event. As it progresses, what's the objective of this event? And how is it different than DevNext events in your mind? >> Yeah, look, I think, just as my opinion and this is how I see it. For a long time, infrastructure has been this closed ecosystem. You buy expensive networking IT infrastructure, you configure it using whatever CLI is available and, like, that's it. And new systems came into being, like, in the cloud, even modern CRMs systems. Like salesforce, modern POS systems, all that stuff. And they all were open platforms. But infrastructure lagged. It was always a close ecosystem. I think what DevNet, kind of, stands for is the opening up of that ecosystem. And allowing the network to, like, dynamically react to the needs of the business. And to really be controlled in a new way. DevNet create for me is, sort of, this is inaugural event of, sort of, Cisco really stepping out and declaring, this is going to be the way of the future. I think we're all going to be sitting here in five years down at Moscone as they tear down the super structure from a five thousand person DevNet create. And we're going to be saying, "I was here at the first one. "I was in San Francisco for the first DevNet." >> Present and creation. >> Todd: Yes, exactly. >> Well done, totally love the mission. I think it's super important. Again, they're not mutually exclusive communities, they're merging together and it's a rising tide, congratulations. Todd Nightingale, senior vice president, general manager of Cisco Meraki cloud automation. Loves automated testing, but again, that's many practices that DevOps eat, those infrastructure is code, developer freedom. That's the theme here. We've got the more live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, stay with us. (upbeat music)